Personal Affects: Power & Poetics in Contemporary South African Art, Vol I by The Africa Center

PERSONAL AFFECTS

PERSONAL AFFECTS Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art

Curated by David Brodie Laurie Ann Farrell Churchill Madikida Sophie Perryer Liese van der Watt

With essays and interviews by Okwui Enwezor Tracy Murinik Liese van der Watt

MUSEUM FOR AFRICAN ART New York SPIER Cape Town

PERSONAL AFFECTS is published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title organized by the Museum for African Art, New York and Spier, Cape Town September 21 2004 — January 3 2005 The exhibition is presented at the Museum for African Art and the Cathedral of St John the Divine, New York, as part of Season South Africa

Hollard The catalogue is sponsored by Hollard Season South Africa is sponsored by Spier, Brand South Africa, Nando's, Hollard, and Winecorp and its Spier Wines. Additional support for the exhibition has been provided by the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York. Curators David Brodie, Laurie Ann Farrell, Churchill Madikida, Sophie Perryer, Liese van der Watt Editor Sophie Perryer Copyright 2004 © Museum for African Art, New York; Spier, Cape Town; the authors; the photographers; and the artists. All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced without written permission from the Museum for African Art, 36-01 43rd Avenue, Long Island City, NY I 1 I 01, www.africanart.org, or Spier, PO Box 137, Lynedoch 7603, South Africa, www.spier.co.za Available through DAP/Distributed Art Publishers 155 Sixth Avenue, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10013 Tel:(212) 627-1999 Fax:(212) 627-9484 www.artbook.com All images courtesy of the artists unless otherwise specified. New York and work in progress photographs by Mario Todeschini. Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders but if any have inadvertently been overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity. Library of Congress Control Number:2004111256 Paper bound ISBN 0-945802-42-0 Design by Gillian Fraenkel Reproduction by Hirt and Carter, Cape Town Printed and bound in Singapore by Tien Wah Press

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CONTENTS

Sponsor statements Ho!lard Insurance Spier Brand South Africa

6 7 8

Prefaces Museum for African Art — Elsie McCabe Cathedral of St John the Divine —The Rev Canon Tom Miller

11 12

Foreword Dick Enthoven

Introduction David Brodie, Laurie Ann Farrell, Churchill Madikida, Sophie Perryer, Liese van der Watt

Acknowledgements

The Enigma of the Rainbow Nation: Contemporary South African Art at the Crossroads of History Okwui Enwezor

Towards an 'Adversarial Aesthetics': A Personal Response to Personal Affects Liese van der Watt

The artists Interviewed by Tracy Murinik

RI Jane Alexander • Wim Botha • Steven Cohen

58 66 74

•Churchill Madikida II Mustafa Maluka

80 86 94

• Thando Mama • Samson Mudzunga •Jay Pather

100 108 116

•Johannes Phokela • Robin Rhode

Doreen Southwood • Clive van den Berg

122 128 134 140 146

• Minnette Vari • Diane Victor

152 158

•Sandile Zulu

164

• Claudette Schreuders • Berni Searle

Artists' biographies Curators and contributors Museum for African Art donors and staff

170 173 174

CATALOGUE SPONSOR We at Hollard Insurance believe that South Africa's achievements of the past decade are inspirational, and that the artistic expression of the country's people should be shared beyond its borders. Democracy has created a climate in which the arts are able to flourish. This climate embraces freedom of expression, eleven official languages and the euphoric victory embodied in global icon Nelson Mandela, as well as the continued challenges of the present and the righting of past wrongs. The arts offer a window to the nation's soul, which is why Hollard Insurance is proud to sponsor Personal Affects:Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art.The catalogue to this exhibition offers readers and viewers across the world a unique vantage point from which to encounter the thriving creativity of our nation. Sheila Surgey General Manager: Group Marketing Hollard Insurance

Hollard

SEASON SOUTH AFRICA SPONSOR To say that Spier supports arts and culture would be to reverse the concepts. It is arts and culture that support Spier, that sustain us as an organization, as a family and as individuals. Spier exists because of the extraordinary creativity and vibrant culture that permeate South Africa, from our home in the Cape, throughout the country and into every corner of Africa. Creativity and culture resonate still further, in all the influences that have shaped South African history, memory and experience, and continue to do so today. We sit at a crossroads of these energies, influences, ideas and possibilities, and recognize that it is this confluence that gives us strength and inspires us to share the many gifts that our nation, our culture and our people have to offer. Spier has its home in the Western Cape of South Africa, in the heart of the wine region, one of the places most blessed with natural beauty on the face of the earth. From producing award-winning wines to producing feature films, from hosting guests in our village hotel to hosting artists in the Spier Arts Summer Season,from sensory delights at our four restaurants to aesthetic richness in our contemporary art collection, we bring people, ideas and cultures together at Spier in an environment that is financially, ecologically and socially sustainable. Spier's role in bringing Personal Affects: Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art to New York has helped take us further afield. It allows us to express who we are, where we come from and what we hope to achieve,in new places, reaching new audiences. It helps us bring together different cultures and ideas in order to enrich the lives of those who engage with the exhibition â&#x20AC;&#x201D; as artists, curators, sponsors, writers, critics and, most importantly, as viewers and readers who come to know something about South Africa and hopefully something more about themselves and what we share across continents. Adrian Enthoven Chief Executive Officer The Spier Group

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SEASON SOUTH AFRICA SPONSOR Brand South Africa, the International Marketing Council of South Africa's initiative to showcase the country both within her borders and abroad, is proud to be a partner to Personal Affects: Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art, and to Season South Africa, the overarching project of which the exhibition forms a part. Established by President Thabo Mbeki in 2000, the International Marketing Council is a public-private partnership tasked with creating a single brand positioning for South Africa and coordinating the many initiatives which showcase South Africa to the rest of the world. Season South Africa is one of these. From a Brand South Africa perspective, the Season South Africa initiative presents an ideal opportunity for South Africa to showcase her achievements in the arts, and her success in working with the raw talent and latent ability of her people and transforming them into globally acclaimed artists and performers. Season South Africa is perfectly aligned with the International Marketing Council's mission of promoting South Africa as one of the world's leading, and most admired, emerging markets. It also highlights one of Brand South Africa's key messages â&#x20AC;&#x201D; that South Africans are ordinary people who,through their "can do" attitude and tenacity, achieve extraordinary successes, and,through this, inspire the world to a new way of doing things. The International Marketing Council has pledged its support to Season South Africa in the knowledge that, through this initiative, the potential of South Africa's people, in their diversity, will be exhibited to the rest of the world.The arts fulfill a fundamental role in developing creativity and providing a platform for the vibrancy and energy which embody the spirit of South Africa. It is through its arts and culture that a country's true spirit and essence are communicated, and its people, places and history showcased. It is in this context that Brand South Africa is thrilled to be able to support Season South Africa in a partnership that can only add value to our country. Yvonne Johnston Chief Executive Officer International Marketing Council of South Africa

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NEW YORK. FEBRUARY 2004: THE VIEW FROM A TAXI EN ROUTE FROM THE AIRPORT. AND PROJECT PARTICIPANTS IN TRANSIT

CLIVE VAN DEN BERG, TRACY MURINIK, SOPHIE PERRYER AND OTHERS VIEW YINKA SHONIBARE'S WORK ON THE EXHIBITION 'LOOKING BOTH WAYS' AT THE MUSEUM FOR AFRICAN ART, NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 2004

PREFACE Museum for African Art

The Museum for African Art is happy to celebrate its twentieth year in company with South Africa, which is observing its first decade of democracy. Personal Affects: Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art not only focuses on the newly important presence of South Africa on the world art stage, but also on the fact that South Africans themselves developed the themes, chose the artists (with the participation of Museum for African Art curator Laurie Ann Farrell) and, most significantly, provided the funding for this exhibition.Working with Dick Enthoven to help realize his vision for this project has been a most exciting and rewarding experience.This exhibition and book have also benefited greatly through the guidance and support of Ralph Freese, project director, and Kurt Ackermann, project managerThis project reflects the strength of the collaborations between the Museum and South African curators David Brodie, Churchill Madikida,Sophie Perryer and Liese van der Watt.We hope that this will be the start of a new emphasis of ours, inaugurating a period of expanded relations with African artists and professionals as we collaborate to present their visions of their own art and culture. Another pleasing aspect of this exhibition is the opportunity it provides us to work with a future neighbour, the Cathedral of St John the Divine, just up the hill from our new home at Fifth Avenue and 1 10th Street.The Rev Canon Tom Miller, Canon for Liturgy and the Arts at the Cathedral, and Karen DeFrancis, Director of Cathedral Productions, have been incredibly generous in both their invitation and reception of Persona/Affects in the Cathedral.As we begin to shift our attention to a new neighbourhood and an expanded audience, the experience of working with their staff on this visionary project has been very gratifying.Turning the Cathedral's extraordinary spaces into exhibition and performance venues permitted the creation of unique, site-specific works of art that make this a one-of-a-kind exhibition. Presenting this exhibition will emphasize our continuing commitment to showing diverse elements of African art, new as well as old, and to increasing awareness of the continuing cultural vitality of the African continent. Elsie McCabe President

PREFACE Cathedral of St John the Divine

The Cathedral Church of St John the Divine is privileged to be the Manhattan centre for Personal Affects: Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art.This is the visual arts dimension of Season South Africa, NewYork's showcase of South African culture celebrating that country's tenth anniversary of new democracy.The Cathedral also welcomes the opportunity to collaborate with the Museum for African Art as the Museum breaks ground for its new home on the northern edge of Central Park, the gateway to Harlem and that community's rich cultural heritage. As the world's largest gothic cathedral, New York's Cathedral of St John the Divine is also known around the world for its commitment to excellence in the arts and to cultural expressions of the dignity of human life in all its creative vitality.The Cathedral is, then, a particularly appropriate stage for the exhibition of contemporary South African artists who are making their marks on the international arts scene, and it is significant that the works in this exhibition were inspired by the art and architecture of the Cathedral itself. The dedication of these artists to the ongoing creative inspiration among the peoples of the world is congruent with the mission of the Cathedral to be a centre for enlightenment through education and the arts. The Cathedral of St John the Divine was chartered in 1873 at a time of dynamic change in American history.With industrialization and the resulting mass migration of workers from the agricultural South, many of them former slaves, a new creative social energy emerged in New York City.The times were not without turmoil, but the Cathedral was meant to stand as a powerful symbol of hope and reconciliation. By the time the cornerstone of the Cathedral was laid in 1892, immigration from Europe,the Caribbean and other parts of the world added to the vibrant mix of peoples and cultures which were remaking the face of the city.Already a crucible for social and political engagement, New York had also clearly become the pre-eminent centre for the creative and performing arts in America.The Cathedral is proud of its role in New York's continuing prominence in international arts and other endeavours of the human spirit. After many decades of commitment to the dream of freedom and equality for all people, South Africa is actively renewing its ages-old heritage in the arts and pushing toward new frontiers in the nation's cultural life.This initiative is a gift to the world.The Cathedral and the Episcopal Diocese of New York welcome this exhibition as a sign of the promise unfolding in Africa and in recognition of the hopeful energy of South Africa which inspires people of all nations.That dynamic force is wonderfully alive in the spirit of the art and artists who have contributed to Personal Affects: Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art.The curators have integrated into the gothic immensity of the Cathedral a remarkable variety of personal works in various media with an intelligent yet playful sensitivity to this unique setting.

In the spirit of peace and blessing, and in gratitude for all who have worked to bring Season South Africa to the people of New York, the Cathedral welcomes you to Personal Affects: Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art. The Very Rev Dr James A Kowalski Dean of the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine The Rev Canon Tom Miller Canon for Liturgy and the Arts at the Cathedral

FOREWORD

Watching Personal Affects: Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art evolve over the past twelve months has been an engaging and uplifting experience.What started out with the desire to present a visual arts exhibition alongside the Dimpho Di Kopane lyric theatre company's season in New York has grown into a substantial endeavour. The exhibition is spread between the Museum for African Art and the Cathedral of St John the Divine, and comprises works that have mostly been produced expressly for this show. Spier has, in its present incarnation, served as a catalyst for the visual and performing arts over the past decade through the annual Spier Arts Summer Festival, held at the Spier estate in Stellenbosch, outside Cape Town. Spier's resident company, Dimpho Di Kopane, has performed at festivals and venues across the world to great acclaim, but this is the first time that we have supported a visual arts exhibition away from home.This exhibition is a forerunner of future projects at Spier, which we anticipate will grow into a prominent centre for African arts and culture from across the continent. Personal Affects has been realised through the dedication of a number of institutions and individuals. Ralph Freese, who is closely associated with Spier and its values, has been a guardian and wise counsel to the project. Michael Stevenson provided the initial impetus and co-ordinated a curatorial and project management team.The curators,Sophie Perryer, Laurie Ann Farrell, David Brodie, Liese van der Watt and Churchill Madikida, have debated the form and content of the exhibition and committed much time and energy to its realization. Kurt Ackermann has efficiently managed the process of mounting the exhibitions and the season of performances. We have been very fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with the Museum for African Art in New York, whose guidance and experience in co-ordinating exhibitions have been exemplary. In particular, our thanks go to the Museum's president, Elsie McCabe, and curator Laurie Ann Farrell. Our other institutional partner in New York, the Cathedral of St John the Divine, has been extraordinarily receptive and accommodating. Our thanks go to Dean Kowalski and the Rev Canon Tom Miller for their support, as well as Karen DeFrancis and her team for their patience and assistance with the logistics. In many respects, Canon Miller is the godfather of this project as it was his encounter with Dimpho Di Kopane in London that

set in motion the sequence of events that has culminated in this exhibition. He suggested that Dimpho Di Kopane consider performing at the Cathedral complex and encouraged the installation of an exhibition in the Cathedral's inspirational interiors. A decade since the advent of democracy in South Africa, the arts are at an extraordinary juncture, and these exhibitions and performances reflect the exhilarating challenge of the country's transformation. Spier and Season South Africa's sponsors â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Brand South Africa and Nando's â&#x20AC;&#x201D; are delighted to have nurtured and supported this project from its embryonic stages through to its realisation.We trust that New York audiences will be excited and invigorated by the artistic imagination of our nation.

Dick Enthoven

INTRODUCTION David Brodie, Laurie Ann Farrell, Churchill Madikida, Sophie Perryer, Liese van der Watt

In its deepest structure, then, the word "transformation" means: to form the other side, to start creating where you are going. But "trans" also appears in words like transfigure, transfer, transcend, transaction, transgress. transience. And it is embodied in the Dutch hemeltrons, where it means firmament. One could say that in order to create the other side, one has to remake the firmament, no mere change of structure or exterior, but of the guiding essence.â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Antjie Krog,A Change of Tongue, 2003 Personal Affects: Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art showcases 17 artists who engage, through their artistic practice, the complexities of life in South Africa a decade since the country's first democratic elections. Change, at all levels of society, is one of the few things that has remained constant in this time; yet true transformation, as author and poet Antjie Krog describes it, is a slow process: one that sees the country and its people still striving to redefine their place in the world, their relationships to each other and themselves, 10 years into the new dispensation.The title of this exhibition, Personal Affects, emerged from the recognition that, above all, artists' responses to this challenge to "remake the firmament" are intensely personal and individual. The exhibition is the result of active collaboration between five curators, each with different skills and levels of experience, and seventeen artists at various stages in their careers.The project was initiated in 2003 by Dick Enthoven, who has been actively involved in the visual and performing arts in South Africa for many years. In particular, the summer arts festivals at the Spier estate in Stellenbosch, outside Cape Town, over the past decade are testimony to his vision and his broad and eclectic interests.To coincide with South Africa's decade of democracy celebrations, Enthoven envisaged a season of performances for Spier's resident lyric theatre company, Dimpho Di Kopane (DDK),in New York in October 2004, and a parallel visual art exhibition. DDK,through a sequence of fortuitous events,found a home at the Cathedral of St John the Divine on the border of Harlem on the Upper West Side. With the advice of Cape Town gallerist and art historian Michael Stevenson, Enthoven suggested that a team of curators be appointed to debate the form and content of an exhibition, and to this end David Brodie, then curator of contemporary collections at Johannesburg Art Gallery, and Sophie Perryer,founding editor of Art South Africa magazine, were approached to formulate the initial concept.After a visit to New York in November 2003,and a meeting with Laurie Ann Farrell at the Museum for African Art in New York, it was decided to include her in the curatorial team and establish a formal relationship with the Museum as a partner in the project. Soon afterwards artist/curator Churchill Madikida and academic Liese van der Watt were added to the curatorial team.The overall project (which includes Personal Affects and a series of performances staged by DDK), entitled Season South Africa, is directed by Ralph Freese who has over the years been closely involved with Spier. In selecting artists for this exhibition, the curators sought a mix of artists who were not

necessarily recognized within the international realm nor automatically included on the long list of"survey" exhibitions to emerge from this country over the past decade. Despite the continuing prevalence of identity issues in South African art, the curators felt compelled from the start to look for a critical departure point beyond this overworked theme. Repeatedly discussions about the selected artists returned to notions of performance and ritualized action. Not only did these ideas tie in with DDK's season of lyric theatre in New York, but they also resonated with the two spaces proposed for the exhibition: on the one hand, the meditative space of the Cathedral of St John the Divine, on the other the white cube of the Museum for African Art. The selected artists - Jane Alexander,Wim Botha, Steven Cohen, Churchill Madikida, Thando Mama, Mustafa Maluka,Jay Pather,Johannes Phokela, Robin Rhode, Claudette Schreuders, Berni Searle, Doreen Southwood,Samson Mudzunga, Clive van den Berg, Minnette Vari, Diane Victor and Sandile Zulu - were brought to New York in February 2004 to conduct site visits and to discuss initial ideas with the various curators. On their return the artists were given some time to propose works for both the Cathedral and the Museum. The curators then convened in Cape Town to review the proposals and select artworks for the exhibition.The outcome is an exhibition with works in diverse media, including sculpture, drawing, photography, painting, installation, video, performance and dance. A common thread throughout is the highly personal point of departure of the artists' working methods:the use of the body, personal histories,and the construction of personal mythologies. Moving beyond the confines of identity politics towards subtler investigations of agency and affect, this exhibition looks at works of art as the powerful and poetic expressions that artists leave behind — from the ephemeral nature of performance art to more lasting material manifestations.This constant interrogation is what affects our selves: the feelings, emotions, memories and interactions that disrupt our subjectivities recurrently, incessantly.This show examines how these affects are embodied in our personal effects — the objects we choose and create to respond to the world around us. Effects become traces of our affects: they enunciate the power and poetics that characterize our interaction with the restless world through which we move. This catalogue is organized into two main sections. The first presents two essays that contextualize the charged context and issues that surround South African artists. Okwui Enwezor, who directed the second Johannesburg Biennale in 1997 — a seminal point of contact and exchange between South Africa and the global art world — explores the multiple and complex ways in which works of art have functioned (and continue to function) as archives of memory and counter-memory in relation to the colonial and apartheid past. Liese van der Watt contributes a theoretical essay that problematizes the use value of identity constructs in consideration of recent scholarship and a selection of artists.The second section of the book foregrounds the voices of the selected artists through interviews conducted by art critic Tracy Murinik.These commenced during the

New York site visits in February and continued through the subsequent months in which the artists presented and refined their proposals, giving unique insights into individual working processes as well as the progression of the overall exhibition. Personal Affects presents art as traces and residues of existence, documented through the accumulation of materials and concepts. The exhibition celebrates synergy and difference without the need for a predetermined resolution that so often haunts group exhibitions of artists hailing from a similar geographic location.The process that has underscored this exhibition has been unconventional with the purposeful intent that it result in an exhibition that reflects the diversity of artistic practice in South Africa from multiple, very personal perspectives. South Africa is a country of untold complexity with countless public and private narratives competing to be heard, and the interchange, debate and dialogue that characterize daily life in South Africa have been replicated in the process of realizing this exhibition. It is the artists' poetic and powerful meditations on the affects, and effects, of their inner and outer worlds that are on view at the Cathedral of St John the Divine and the Museum for African Art in New York.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Season South Africa was inspired by Dick Enthoven of Spier, who has demonstrated an unsurpassed enthusiasm for the arts in this country. It was a pleasure and an honour for the curators of Personal Affects: Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art to work towards realizing his vision. Ralph Freese,the project director, was a source of calm and informed guidance at all times.The curatorial team was assembled with the advice of Michael Stevenson, who provided unlimited support throughout the curatorial and catalogue editing processes.The curators wish to thank him for his generosity of spirit and valued input, without which this show would doubtless not have come to pass. Kurt Ackermann,the project manager, was as effective a facilitator as any team could wish for, showing incredible endurance in co-ordinating and organizing complex logistics and itineraries. The curators are extremely grateful to the artists: Jane Alexander,Wim Botha, Steven Cohen, Churchill Madikida, Mustafa Maluka,Thando Mama,Samson Mudzunga,Jay Pather, Johannes Phokela, Robin Rhode, Claudette Schreuders, Semi Searle, Doreen Southwood, Clive van den Berg, Minnette Vari, Diane Victor and Sandile Zulu.Their participation in the New York site visits was crucial to the conception of the exhibition and provided the impetus for its progress and development. Many produced new works specifically for

the show,and all engaged with the curators in active and exciting ways around the placement and integration of their works in the Cathedral and Museum spaces. The staff of the Cathedral of St John the Divine are to be thanked profoundly for the open-minded spirit and generosity with which they opened their doors to the project, allowing artists to intervene in sacred spaces and demonstrating a trust in the creative process that resulted in deep mutual respect.Thanks particularly to the Rev Canon Tom Miller for his invitation to use the Cathedral spaces, and to Karen DeFrancis and her production team for facilitating this. The curators would like to thank the Museum for African Art for their decision to become partners in the project and for their extensive facilitation of all aspects of the project in New York. Museum President Elsie McCabe and Senior Adviser Jerome Vogel provided valuable guidance and input.The South African curators are particularly grateful to Laurie Ann Farrell, curator at the Museum for African Art,for her curatorial role in the exhibition at both the Museum and the Cathedral. The curators would like to express gratitude to all staff members and volunteers of the Museum for African Art. Special recognition goes to Kenita Lloyd, Director of Operations; Heidi Holder, Director of Education; Giacomo Mirabella, Registrar; Margo Donaldson, Senior Development Officer:Jennifer Goldberg, Manager, Individual and Institutional Relationships; Sara Adelman, Museum Educator; Michelle Pinedo, Project Accountant, Andrei Nadler, Controller; and Margarita Khaimova,Accountant.We would also like to acknowledge the many hours of assistance that we received from Museum Volunteer Allison Moore. The curators' thanks go to Okwui Enwezor for his commitment to producing a significant essay for the catalogue, and to Tracy Murinik for her insightful and entertaining interviews with the artists.We also thank Gillian Fraenkel for her care in designing the catalogue, Mario Todeschini for the fresh vision of his photographs documenting the New York site visits and works in progress;and John Hodgkiss for his photographic work in Johannesburg. We are grateful to Robert Kloos, Director of Visual Arts at the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York,for his support. Many thanks are due to lighting designer JoAnne Lindsley,for taking on the spectacular task of lighting both exhibition venues; to Sunil Bald of SUMO,for his creative exhibition design; and to John Melick,Antoine Vigne and Elana Rubinfeld at Blue Medium for communicating the ideas and images of this project to the press.

Contemporary South African Art at the Crossroads of History

Okwui Enwezor

I Prolegomena: On the Vanishing Present' In April, the tenth anniversary of South Africa's first democratic elections passed quietly, almost unnoticed in the international media.That apartheid had given up the ghost of its lugubrious reign might have seemed incentive enough to reflect on both its depredations and the issues of freedom, life and liberty with which its epitaph was written. Given the momentous,even monumental symbolism of this anniversary and the currency of democracy in global politics, it was, to say the least, a curious kind of silence. If this global silence were to disclose its veiled message, would it be that South Africa is the perfect corpse of the vanishing present,that culture of amnesia which threatens to overtake all forms of historical memory? Would it be that post-apartheid culture and the warm fuzzy feeling communicated in that infectious, saccharine jingle of the mid-1990s, Simunye,We are One, is now so terribly out of date, out of time, out of tune? How could it be that this post-apartheid culture which was only recently lauded as a paragon of reconciliation between victim and oppressor, native and settler, spawning embarrassing encomiums, did not register even as a blip on the blinkered radar screen of current global consciousness? Which raises the question of the state of the most exemplary transition to democracy in living historical memory. Does South Africa's decade of democracy â&#x20AC;&#x201D; which by any standards has been a great success â&#x20AC;&#x201D; represent a different sort of horizon for the democratic ideal, one radically dissimilar to what is intended by the global purveyors of democracy? Was the silence surrounding the anniversary part of that old business of Afropessimism? If this rebuff of the historical moment par excellence in the age of history as a televisual spectacle communicated any anxiety about South Africa as recidivist in its politics, it was nonetheless an unusual silence.Are we already weary of and inured to the endless repetition of the tale of the last miracle of the 20th century? Or is there a larger message being communicated to the government of President Thabo Mbeki; a signal perhaps of what lies beyond the horizon of reconciliation? 2 The Cracked Mirror Mbeki is not as beloved a political figure by his countrymen and women as the deified Nelson Mandela was. To his detractors, it is besides the point that his stewardship of the country during a period of difficulty and change in the global arena has been steady. By all accounts Mbeki's tenure has been disciplined and efficient,All business with a dash of impoliticness in its technocratic precision and sometimes bluntness, Mbeki's style seen through the prism of Mandela's charisma and media magnetism is utterly lacking in the telegenic spectacle necessary for any modern government in its war of ideas with opponents. For one, South Africa's decade of democracy has, accompanying it, a terrifying spiral of violence and death especially from crime and AIDS.The country, it would seem, is too much at war with itself to appreciate its moment of triumph in its proper historical context. Secondly, the African political sphere has been a mess and the shuttle diplomacy on behalf of multiple conflicts throughout the continent and in the Southern African region by President Mbeki has not always been welcome at home.While the government has been bold in some measures (in the management of the economy and diplomacy), it has been timid in others (for example in its disastrous AIDS policy and land redistribution programme). Despite the doomsayers,South Africa has neither unraveled nor become a banana republic and police state. It has a flourishing democracy.Though the opposition Democratic Party never fails to see it otherwise: there are constant intimations that the overwhelming electoral majority of the governing African National Congress is a prelude for a Zimbabwe-style dictatorship to emerge, stifling all credible opposition. In such a climate of suspicion a festering discord is threatening to erode the critical gains of the transition to democracy.The increasingly polarized perceptions of blacks and whites about the condition of the country illustrate this. In April, as South Africa was preparing to go to the polls, a survey of South Africans' views of the orientation of the country was published.Asked what was their greatest concern in leading a healthy, productive life in the country, blacks and whites answered with what might at first appear to be contradictory

responses. In the survey, seventy percent of white respondents stated that their greatest fear was crime, while a similar percentage of black respondents answered that lack of jobs posed the greatest threat. How are we to explain this divergence? At face value these responses present South Africans as socially alienated from each other, ossified in their own contradictions.Yet, read closely, the expressions of the black and white respondents mirror each other, in so far as they both express the desire for security and comfort.What is at issue, then, is the means for achieving the specific goals of less crime and more jobs. It is here that a visible chasm seems to open up between the perceptions of whites and blacks. For most visitors to the new South Africa or those who follow news reports from the country, there are two predominant perceptions to contend with: violent crime and AIDS. But rarely are poverty and race added into the equation to explain the disparity in living conditions. So it comes down to crime and jobs. Staring into this cracked mirror one is only able to glimpse broken and unstable images.As a former resident of Johannesburg, I know all too well this pathology: of fear and loathing. I know also how powerful the sense of denial of poverty and race is among the intelligentsia. 3.0 Memory/Counter-memory: The Museum and Trauma In all of Africa, South Africa has perhaps the most comprehensive and sophisticated network of institutions, media and forums for art.The country's art schools are well equipped and have access to critical information about developments in the history of ideas and art.There are museums and art centres in just about every major city in the country. Places like Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban and Bloemfontein boast multiple venues for arts and culture.There is a flourishing publishing industry and imaginative theatre is produced across the country.There are festivals of international repute, chief among them the Grahamstown Festival, Arts Alive in Johannesburg, the Cape Town Festival, Klein Karoo Arts Festival and of course the defunct Johannesburg Biennale. In fact, museums of history, art and cultural festivals have become a kind of secondary industry for those interested in the global circuit of tourism into which South Africa taps so liberally. In addition, there is another sort of museum,staunchly ahistorical and unabashedly dedicated to the entertainment value that a fictionalized, usable African past can provide. In these museums of frozen African cultures,from the Neolithic evocation of the Bushman hunter/gatherer recreated in Kagga Kamma in the Cape to Zulu "cultural villages" in KwaZulu-Natal and other places, touristic voyeurism meets African native kitsch. Here culture â&#x20AC;&#x201D; or more precisely remnants of culture â&#x20AC;&#x201D; is deployed in full display such as in the enactments of war dances,fireside storytelling and other invented village motifs as part of a recaptured past, showing European tourists the way it really was before colonialism and apartheid supposedly destroyed them.There is no memory here; rather there is ur-memory.The museum of the past is not only the site where the contradictions of modernity and tradition are narrated, it is the very site of the invention of history and culture. But this museum of folklore and sentimentality, which bears very little resemblance to the past it narrates, is largely invisible to the gaze of the ordinary South African, located as it is in a touristic lacuna. Besides this frozen memory zone reinvented as museums of living history and culture, in what ways might the visitor to South Africa engage with "history" and reckon with the "past"? The museums that are of interest here are those specifically created to look after the past: museums of memory, if you will. In a country with the powerful heritage of apartheid, colonialism and slavery, museums of memory have the kind of cultural capital that can be deployed not just for programmes of remembering, but as veritable destinations of historical tourism as well.The District Six and Robben Island museums in Cape Town,and the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg,fall into this category. However, I would also like to suggest these, paradoxically, as counter-memory museums. Let me explain. One of the powerful legacies of three hundred and fifty years of colonialism and apartheid was the war of symbols manufactured by both colonialist and apartheid ideologues to secure the occupation of South Africa. In other words, by way of transplanted I

European spatial design, building traditions, as well as monuments erected all across the country to celebrate and inculcate European culture, colonial and apartheid power systematically worked to erase the presence of the autochthonous groups that made up pre-colonial South Africa and to replace them with other archetypes and representations of civility.The building of South Africa by successive groups of Dutch and British colonialists since the first Dutch settlement by Jan van Riebeeck in the Cape in 1652 has inexorably left on the South African landscape a counter-memory of its own.

THE APARTHEID MUSEUM. JOHANNESBURG COURTESY OF MASHABANE ROSE ASSOCIATES

This is not the place to narrate the effects of the monuments to colonialism and apartheid, empire and nationalism, but it is worth recalling that some of the most significant monuments to which the new postapartheid museums respond have to do with the counter-memory of colonial and apartheid's effacements of African cultural memory for more than three hundred years.Yet to inaugurate a museum of apartheid is equally to engage in a strategy of counter-memory,for it is a response to a history that was a response to another history in a cyclical battle of symbolic representations. In other words, memory and history in the post-apartheid context are not just mediations of various kinds of representations of the past, they are also mediums for a war of positions between narratives of autochthony and origin on the one hand and terra nullis on the other. Erected in the shadow of the ponderous architecture of the Voortrekker Monument situated between Johannesburg and Pretoria, next to the small Afrikaner suburban enclave appropriately named Verwoerdburg in its earlier incarnation (after the chief architect of apartheid), the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg literally has to face the nemesis of its own existence. It is a nemesis that at once threatens and mobilizes its very becoming.What the Apartheid Museum offers is not then a memory lesson as it were (it is effectively frozen by the stare of the belligerent Voortrekker edifice) but a counter-memory lesson by way of a certain appealing traumatography. 3.1 The Museum and Archive There is more than a semantic connection between the museum and the archive.While each is denoted as host (the system of consignation) and house (the system of domiciliation) of objects, documents and material of historical importance, it is their interpretative functions that require sustained attention in South Africa.The archive is the convergence in a system of simultaneity of a spatial and temporal concept. It both marks space and keeps pace with it in time.Yet, while museums have proliferated in the "new" South Africa, the archive has largely fallen mute.What may be the reason for this silence? In a recent book, British art historian Annie Coombes has written of the clash of representations of the symbols and signs that spill in such promiscuous flood from the museum and archive as the lacerating discourse between "Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa".2The mode of visualizing, of making immanent within a certain public decorum,suppressed images of the past has been the peculiar challenge of the new South Africa.And the greatest challenge of all has been in opening up the vast archives of the apartheid past. While the archive and its contents appear,for now, unapproachable (its secrets held in reserve and at a distance), the museum currently serves a supplementary function for what the archive withholds.3 To assuage the raging curiosity to know and unravel the past, the Apartheid Museum, District Six Museum and Robben Island Museum represent attempts at disclosing larger issues of public memory and history in South Africa's post-apartheid hunger for mnemonic forms.The Apartheid Museum is an attempt at totality, to encompass in one institutional frame the narrative path of apartheid in the entire country. District Six's primary appeal is to the local history of Cape Town,specifically the micro-narrative of displacement of the largely multicultural community evicted from the neighbourhood as a consequence of apartheid's covetous gerrymandering and spatial engineering. Robben Island Museum is specific in its architecture, yet its microcosmic universe articulates the larger device of the apartheid state as a panoptic structure of confinement and control.

3.2 Making the Archive How was the memory of the colonial and apartheid past indexed in artistic production? Perhaps one of the most original archives of this past resides, literally, in works of art themselves. I mean this both in the imaginative sense in which works of art are contained — in a space-time relationship with spectators — and as concrete objects holding readable information. In addition, works of art force a tension between depiction and representation, between analysis and documentation. Let us take the example of the painter Gerard Sekoto. His work between 1938 and 1947, when he left South Africa permanently for exile in Europe, consists almost entirely of genre scenes, but also views of social alienation. In his paintings, watercolours and drawings, we are quickly acquainted with his skilled, academic style. But we also see in full flower germs of a method, namely an attempt in his paintings to organize — in a thematic and systematic fashion — an archive, a record of South African society as lived by those most undermined by its official institutions.

GERARD SEKOTO YELLOW HOUSES, A STREET IN SOPHIATOWN OIL ON CARDBOARD 50.8 X 74.5CM 1940 COURTESY OF JOHANNESBURG ART GALLERY DAVID GOLDBLATT THE DESTRUCTION OF DISTRICT SIX AFTER ITS DECLARATION AS A GROUP AREA FOR WHITES. AND THE FORCED REMOVAL OF ITS COLOURED INHABITANTS, CAPE TOWN,

All of Sekoto's South African work can be understood as simultaneously an oeuvre (specific to Sekoto) and an archive (open to a culture and public). For such judgment to be relevant by recourse to both individual paintings and subject matter, a constant recurrence in his work is the city, specifically areas of the city inhabited by black Africans, such as Sophiatown. Sekoto painted and drew numerous pictures of this fabled and culturally vibrant black section of Johannesburg destroyed in the 1950s under the apartheid Group Areas Act.Along with photographs of the defunct neighbourhood,Sekoto's paintings such as Yellow Houses, A Street in Sophiatown (1940), Horse and Cart, Sophiatown (1939-40), Yard in Sophiatown (1940-42), Interior with Woman,Sophiatown (1940-42) and Cyclists in Sophiatown (1940-42) stand as traces of the erased memory of that site. In the repeated depiction of Sophiatown there is an overwhelming sense of experience and memory, more than quaint picturesqueness, in the scenes of daily life that emanate from it. Yellow Houses, with its brightly painted row of houses and cerulean sky, is caught as if in clear mid-noon. In the painting, an unpaved, almost dusky rose-coloured stone-pitted street cuts the two sides of the painting in half. On the left, the houses extend the perspectival rendering to the point where a figure in a bicycle is descending a slope past a mound of brownish earth. Further down,a young girl with her arms on top of her head walks towards the entrance to a compound, while to the left a young boy steps out of what appears to be a store, clutching a bundle of provisions, into a fenced in enclosure adjacent to the street.This image, like that of Horse and Cart, which shows the horse driver and his rearing white horse in the centre of an elongated street with neat rows of houses on each side, teems with life. In contrast to these two cheerful paintings, Cyclists, Yard and Interior (all in Sophiatown) are more expressionistic, ambiguous, dense with meaning.The light in these three paintings is colder and less effusive than in the previous two paintings. By revisiting some of these old paintings, my intention is to establish the relationship between new forms of museological practice and the archival nature of certain works of art that are at one and the same time both archive and artworks.

CAPE, 5 MAY 1982 COURTESY OF THE ARTIST DAVID GOLDBLATT REMNANT OF A HEDGE PLANTED IN 1660 TO KEEP THE INDIGENOUS KHOIKHOI OUT OF THE FIRST EUROPEAN SETTLEMENT IN SOUTH AFRICA. KIRSTENBOSCH, CAPE TOWN, CAPE, 16 MAY 1993 COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

To memorialize the destruction of District Six in Cape Town also requires that we re-examine other kinds of effaced communities to make way for apartheid's Manichean spatial project. Here Sophiatown serves more than an adjunct function: it accompanies the museumification of District Six. It in fact challenges the amnesia that has settled over many other bulldozed communities,This is what is remarkable in Sekoto's images, which distill the notion of painting as experience and memory and as such fundamental to identity in post-apartheid South Africa.They are history paintings painted after the end of history. There is a powerful and haunting image of a bulldozed part of District Six photographed by David Goldblatt in I982.The photograph is sombre, even bleak, save for the sharp sunlight eating into the whitewashed walls in the middle distance of the image.The composition is organized like a jumble of fragmented puzzles that do not quite fit into one clear spatial continuum. In a Barthesian sense there is a war going on between the studium (that expansive mode of spatial formatting that is the very picture of the modern metropolis) and the punctum (that gash of consciousness replayed in the picture of the destruction of a city's identity to make way for real estate).We behold both in Goldblatt's photograph. In fact, the combination of the two is what holds our attention. For while the precision of Goldblatt's compositional control is in full evidence, it is clear that this carcass of a landscape cannot be contained in the frame for things spill out of it, things already destroyed: lives, dreams, dignity.The foreground of the image is of fine soil, strewn with rubble, broken stones and bands of lines that appear like tyre tracks. In the middle ground, the violence of the destroyed neighbourhood mingles the sheared off walls of the razed houses (like limbs crudely ripped from their sockets) with ominous-looking skyscrapers keeping watch like sentinels over the carnage. In the background Signal Hill is softly sheathed in fog. Goldblatt is a master of this kind of picture, dry and direct but emotionally complicated and charged.There are two more of his images: Remnant of a hedge planted in 1660 to keep the indigenous Khoikhoi out of the first European settlement in South Africa (1993) and Sculpture commemorating the first and most recent political prisoners on Robben Island (1991), which are worth revisiting.The first is a diagonal close-up of a clump of semi-tended bush, which begins on the left corner with a dark, gaping grotto and tapers out on the right edge into a sparse hedge and softwhite cotton clouds.Were it not for Goldblatt's penchant for historical specificity, we would have taken this uninteresting clump as an example of landscape photography. But the image belies what it in fact depicts, namely a cordon sanitaire, the origin of colonial and apartheid spatial practice. It is worth quoting the complete text of this image. In an inscription that accompanies it Goldblatt writes of the history of the hedge: "At first the Khoikhoi had willingly traded their sheep and cattle for the tobacco and copper offered by officials of the Dutch East India Company, which had established a settlement at the Cape in 1652 for the victualling of its fleets plying between Europe and the East. But then as it became clear that the Dutch were there to stay and that the settlers were encroaching on water and grazing, conflict erupted. In 1659 the Khoikhoi attacked farms, destroyed crops, and seized livestock.The commander of the settlement,Jan van Riebeeck, then ordered the creation of a cordon of block houses and barriers, of which a wild almond hedge, nearly nine kilometers long, was a part. It was intended that the tough, dense bush would prevent people and livestock from passing except at controlled posts.The hedge ended at the foot of the mountain in what is now the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden, where this fragment still grows."' The second photograph extends and transforms the first, in that it locates the conflict between memory and history. Photographed on Robben Island shortly after the release of the political prisoners housed there, the photograph is of a concrete sculpture made by Japhta Masemola (a founding member of the Pan Africanist Congress) of a man in underpants with a bow slung across his chest, and a dog.The sculpture depicts Robben Island's first political prisoner, the Khoikhoi chief,Autshumato, marooned on the island by the Dutch in 1658. Goldblatt's photographs of the South African landscape and built environment are what I call archive pictures, in the sense that he literally treats the landscape as a veritable archive.Within his COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

photographic vision the land is cipher for a larger historical narrative, whether cultivated, sculpted or merely depicted.These images serve as another form of remembering,a counter-memory which bears witness to what is unrecoverable. With its destruction and records thereof, District Six is no longer a place but the trace of a place, an index of an erased history, which, as seen in Goldblatt's images, evokes a history of place and subjectivity, power and empowerment. Goldblatt's careful, studied analysis of the relationship between structures and their representations within broader narratives leaves in place other ways of knowing and thinking in response to apartheid and colonialism. Seen from this purview, District Six â&#x20AC;&#x201D; in fact the entire country â&#x20AC;&#x201D; contains other similar micro narratives of effaced and erased communities such as Sophiatown in Johannesburg and Durban's Cato Manor. To the extent that the museum as a site of public memory is the appropriate framework to explore this history, the Robben Island Museum is perhaps the most difficult to foreground.As South Africa's first and most notorious gulag archipelago, Robben Island prison's conversion into a museum (with Nelson Mandela's former cell clearly the main centre of attraction for the visitor's gaze) comes perilously close to memory kitsch while obscuring the consequences of its larger political purpose. The recuperation of these sites of trauma and violation, erasure and deportation, reinvests the museological aesthetic with its own counter-memory.As such the Apartheid Museum, District Six Museum and Robben Island Museum are not institutions engaged in acts of recuperation, poised between narrating and resisting apartheid's historical effacements. By seeking to reinstate what had been effaced, these museums serve as counter-memories of that effacement. Rather than a return to some ontological foundation, the post-apartheid museum proposes and formulates orders of public address that are not grounded in the past as such, but in the finitude of the present through the deployment of the archive. However,this archive is not, in the Derridean sense, a commandment and commencement,a place of origin and beginning, authority and mastery. Instead, as formulated by Foucault, the archive marks the appearance of: "the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events. But the archive is also that which determines that all these things said do not accumulate endlessly in an amorphous mass, nor are they inscribed in an unbroken linearity ... but they are grouped together in distinct figures, composed together in accordance with multiple relations, maintained or blurred in accordance with specific regularities ..."5 Just as in the testimonies given to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) some years back, what can be said is only that which can be said at this moment in time, not more.The TRC did not exhaust itself in wanting to collect every possible testimony. In fact, it could not.The terms of agreement for both "victims" and "perpetrators" precluded, in the moral and ethical relativism given in the name of fairness and due process, that the past would remain a dark place.The post-apartheid museum treads on similar ground. For though it indicates a procedure of address for the social reception of the history of apartheid, it does not exhaust itself in the question of its culpability in that history. Just as educational and civic institutions (schools, universities, libraries, museums, etc) which formerly discriminated against blacks did not have to give testimony to the TRC,the postapartheid museum remains shrouded in ambiguity. In fact none of the principal institutions necessary for the survival of apartheid were dragged into the public square of the TRC's show trial.To come into being then, the post-apartheid museum must by necessity adopt a similar public decorum. It can only say and show what had already been said and seen, the already known and represented. It merely repeats and confirms it. But never does it delve beneath the topsoil of the spectatorial distractions (pictures of the Sharpeville massacre or the pied of Hector Petersen, let's say) which COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

it manufactures for its exegetic purposes.The unspeakable and unnameable thus remain unsaid, un-named, unseen.They are suppressed in the post-apartheid archive, repressed in memory and immobilized in the museum.The unique event of the apartheid past is thus both a deferred meditation on its historical concordance with the present and a gaping void, a black hole in memory,the unrepresentable yet to encounter its own archaeology.

3.3 Monuments Without Memorials or the Impossibility of Bearing Witness

THE VOORTREKKER MONUMENT. PRETORIA COURTESY OF VOORTREKKER MONUMENT AND NATURE RESERVE

In her book, Passages in Modern Sculpture, art historian and theorist Rosalind Krauss writes of an opening scene in Sergei Eisenstein's film October (1927) in which a crowd of revolutionaries descends upon a monument of the deposed Czar Nicholas II and, in a surge of convulsive energy, topples it, decapitating it from its base. In the last two decades, the global public has witnessed similar topplings of statues and monuments and the rise of new ones in their stead.Who knows what will replace Saddam Hussein's monument on Firdos Square in Baghdad or the huge, grossly oversized head of JG Strijdom in Strijdom Square, Pretoria? What heroic deeds or follies do these monuments symbolize? And how does their sculptural facture bear witness to their place in the public sphere that opposes them after the termination of their historical import? Whose memory do they commemorate? And whose history do they erase or suppress? In these questions what one encounters is not so much the transformation of a symbol of power into the ignominy of defeat (as illustrated by the destruction of the Czar's and Saddam Hussein's statues), but a temporal displacement of the sculptural effects of the monument.This displacement resides in the fact that the monument as an architecture of effect simultaneously combines and opposes time and space, history and narration, each symbolizing by means of statuary a series of ideologies and formal spaces.' In this organization of the spatial and ideological, it might be worth investigating the alliance of the two in South Africa. To do so it might also be worth contemplating the "memorial" as another form that attaches spatially to the monument, yet is disconnected from it â&#x20AC;&#x201D; structurally â&#x20AC;&#x201D; in a temporal sense.The distinction between the monument and memorial can best be summarized not just in their structural differences. Monuments tend towards the secular and heroic, while memorials, even if secular, often have a somber, contemplative and sacral character. But also in their historical enactment,the former are often celebratory, while the latter tend towards the commemorative. Monuments authorize events as history, while memorials consecrate them. If monuments are architectonic and as such spatialized, that is as literal ideological attachments to space, memorials serve the function of a temporalized gesture within the time-scope of the sacred. Only in rare cases has the fusion of the two functions been successfully combined.Two such cases that come to mind are Yad Vashem in Jerusalem (erected in the memory of Holocaust survivors) and Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC. In both cases, the monument characterizes and enacts a historical moment in a general sense, encompassing a broad trajectory of time and places. At the same time it singularizes and condenses this experience, making it specific to individuals memorialized within it. However, in South Africa we witness the crisis of the fusion of the monument and memorial.The Voortrekker Monument (constructed to celebrate the Great Trek of the Boers across South Africa in 1838) represents the best example of such a combination in South Africa, and its utter failure. In retelling the story of the Great Trek, the Voortrekker Monument combines in its narrative structure the messianic with the mythical.This combination, which is meant to inculcate the religious symbolism of sacrifice and offering, transforms what might otherwise have become a secular historical story into a cult of triumphant Boer power. In an architectural sense the Voortrekker Monument mimics the fascist style of similar structures, though instead of heavy-handed neo-classicism the Pretoria structure takes on the quality of the archaic. To a large extent, it is an architectural non-style, neither resembling the past nor invoking the future. But what it ultimately proposes is the symbolization of the heroic attitude of the Afrikaner mythology of nationalism. In the interior and inner sanctum of the monument,the multiple friezes and reliefs carved COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

directly onto the walls tell the heroic story of Afrikaner patriots (male and female), paterfamilias and their defeated "African" enemies as one unified history of a singular and unique culture to the exclusion of others. When viewed from the context of the post-apartheid present, the retrogressive nature of this ideological staging becomes even more striking in its historical erasures.While the interior is designed to lend a worshipful sacrality to the staging, it nonetheless fails.The Monument is always singular and unique to the Afrikaner story of origin; its heroic and celebratory refunctioning of the story and its myths of bravery, ingenuity, endurance and sacrifice often take priority over the country's complex story of slavery, colonialism, dispossession and struggle.This crisis in the staging of the celebratory and the commemorative attempted by the erectors of the Monument ties together in the ambivalent reaction of a number of South African artists who have explored this terrain of history and identity,for the native story of Afrikaner survival and heroism must also face the history of the subjugation of others in the country throughout apartheid's reign of terror. The Monument survives today not just as a relic of racial exclusivity (and for some as a monument to intolerance and racism), but in a paradoxical sense it could be redeployed to defeat its sectarianisnn.The unintended consequence of the defeat of apartheid is that its most cherished symbols today face a crisis of legitimation, and have become (as I have argued throughout) objects of a counter-discourse against its ideology. So if the Voortrekker Monument first symbolized a monument to Afrikaner heroism,and a memorial to their survival during the harrowing 1838 trek, in its projection of Afrikaner power, its objective use now in the untidy process of reconciliation may well turn it into a memorial for those suppressed and brutalized by forty years of apartheid. In his hand-drawn film animation, Monument (1 990),William Kentridge took up the metaphor of the monument and its incommensurability as an effect of political and social power. Kentridge's Monument literalizes the heroic aspect of its sculptural function, while delimiting any sentimentality that may attach it to memorialization. Monument was made against the backdrop of the catalytic events that ended apartheid in 1990.The film's central protagonists are Soho Eckstein,the Johannesburg-based industrialist, mine-owner and real-estate mogul, and a nameless black mine labourer drawn as a symbol of the workers' struggle for economic justice. In the film, drawn in typical Kentridge palimpsest style of accreted and erased traces, we see, in the climatic conclusion of the film, Soho unveiling before a throng a shrouded form which, once he removes the drapery, is shown to be a live black figure standing on a pedestal, shouldering (Atlaslike) an immense load on his back.As a loud cheer rises from the crowd,Soho in ringmaster style turns and gestures towards the slightly undressed figure, who slowly raises its head to face the crowd.The film closes with the rasping breathing of the figure over a dense black field as the film's credit and soaring soundtrack fades.The question to ask is whether Kentridge's Monument is a social realist ode to the "heroic" struggle of black emancipation symbolized by the slave labour that built apartheid capitalism, or whether it calls into question its possible ideologization and myth once black power takes effect in the new democracy to come. It is clear that, since the end of apartheid, the temptation to monumentalize and memorialize aspects of the struggle seem also to palpably enact the attempt by triumphant cultures to efface histories of their defeated opponents. Penny Siopis' Patience on a Monument â&#x20AC;&#x201D;"A History Painting"(1988) anticipated Kentridge's film by a couple of years.The chief rhetorical devices of this large painting (though not as majestic in scale as traditional history painting to which it alludes) concern the nature of the heroic and the monumental,and the painterly as a narrative form of classical historical narration. In this dense painting Siopis constructs the story of her epic by resorting to a composite of painterly discourses (landscape,figuration, abstraction and collage). Siopis combines classicism and realism in her treatment of historical events and by a certain heroic recall inscribes the turmoil of South Africa's history of encounter â&#x20AC;&#x201D; between indigenous culture and European

WILLIAM KENTRIDGE DRAWING FROM MONUMENT CHARCOAL ON PAPER 120 X 150CM 1990 COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

PENNY SIOPIS PATIENCE ON A MONUMENT A 'HISTORY PAINTING' OIL PAINT AND COLLAGE 200 X 180CM 1988 COURTESY OF WILLIAM HUMPHREYS ART GALLERY. KIMBERLEY AND THE ARTIST

settlers — in space by way of objectification and reification.There are other combinations that make this painting the tour de force that it is; for example, we see this in the attempt to unify different genres of representation that cover the entire spectrum of art in South Africa. Beginning in the top area of the painting, we see how Siopis has incorporated and sublimated the style of colonial landscape paintings of Thomas Baines and the proto-apartheid representations of territory by JH Pierneef. In each of these two discourses,from Baines' soft-hued pastorals to Pierneef's muscular, architectonic eruptions of rock and terrain (a kind of primitivized Cezanne), South Africa's European painters persistently depicted the emptiness and immemorial nature of a land without time or people, a land waiting for civility, thus pulling the colonial soul towards the manifest destiny of white settler occupation.The concept of terra nullis, prevalent in other histories of colonization, evokes the land to be occupied,first as a wilderness, and thereafter as a terrain ready to be named and domesticated. JM Coetzee writes in his penetrating essay on the colonial representation of landscape in South Africa according to a certain picturesque tradition that,—The Wilds,' the wilderness' are resonant words in the Judeo-Christian tradition. In one sense, the wilderness is a world where the law of nature reigns, a world over which the first act of culture,Adam's act of naming, has not been performed."7 To appreciate the deft aspect of this instruction as embedded in Siopis' painting, one has to make acquaintance with the history of representation of landscape in South African discourse. It is within this discourse that Patience on a Monument ... is situated.As the gaze moves downwards to the middle of the painting another trope makes an appearance: the clash of civilization, exemplified by the emergence of culture in nature, the manifestation of"Adam's act of naming". Here, craggy, volcanic nature (symbolizing the cataclysmic event of creation and the primordialism often attributed to wild, untamed nature) of the landscape slowly gives way to the verdant plains of cultivated land and habitation. In this shift of perception Siopis brings into focus a masterful, gestic combination of domestication and modernity.As the eyes travel further down towards the central part of the painting, one sees a classical (in ancient Greek sculptural style), softly draped black female figure peeling fruit, seated atop a mound of facetted structure that tapers into the form of a pyramid. This figure looms and occupies a prominent portion of the painting — in fact becomes the focus of the gaze. Beneath the figure (atop her throne of indecipherable crockery) lies a vast and dense accumulation of objects, people (black and white,African and European, native and settler, tribal and civilized) debris, animals, etc.

The resulting image is at once pastoral and a ruin, so that to read the painting opens it up to a number of subtle contradictions. But what immediately makes Siopis' grand gesture impressive is her ability to set side by side two scales of history, one resolutely pointing to the past in the form of her reference to the Egyptian pyramids (a glorious African past?) on which the obviously black Patience sits, and the other the ruin of history that brings modernity into force (the decline brought on by European modernizing imperialism on other cultures?).As such Siopis' Patience on a Monument ... seems to quote Paul Klee's Angelus Novus.Walter Benjamin's spectacular interpretation of this Klee painting (which the philosopher and critic had acquired) provides the singular insight into what Siopis seems to be after in the effect of her painting. Benjamin assigns Klee's Angelus Novus (the Angel of History) a demonic character,9 as literally the harbinger of destruction and decline.This angel is caught in a frozen time-space, trapped between the past and future in a perpetual present in which modernity is apprehended as nothing short of a catastrophe. The angel, it turns out, will not lead mankind into paradise for its appearance is to simultaneously bring us the news and to witness the destruction wrought by what is generally called progress.9 In this scene of devastation an uncanny bond unites the thesis of Siopis' painting and the allegory of Kentridge's film,for both unfold the wreckage that defines South Africa's catastrophe. Rosalind Krauss in her fine text on Kentridge's work locates this catastrophe in his modeling of Monument after Samuel Beckett's play Catastrophe,1Â° while Siopis does so in her painting's filiation to Klee's Angelus Novus.To realign once more what has already been said, the irreducible link between the monument and the memorial ultimately concerns South Africa's catastrophe, and its search for new symbols may place it beyond ideology and bring it into coherence with collective memory. 4.0 Memory Fever" They had a passion for it.Throughout the 1990s artists in South Africa took on enunciating the relationship between memory and history.As if in one paroxysm of recollection a flood of artistic works â&#x20AC;&#x201D; profound and prosaic â&#x20AC;&#x201D; began entering the public domain. Encompassing performance,film, video, photography, installation and sculpture, young artists such as Candice Breitz, Senzeni Marasela, Moshekwa Langa, Minnette Vari,Tracey Rose, Peet Pienaar and Hentie van der Merwe,taking conceptual cues from older artists like Gavin Jantjes,William Kentridge, Sue Williamson and Penny Siopis, elaborated a system of address that did more than reference the archive, but deployed it also as a mode of interrogating history, memory and identity. In these works, memory and identity oftentimes coalesced to force new confrontations. However, it is important to underscore what memory in the context of post-apartheid artistic production may connote. Memory in its inimitable way resembles the work of mourning. For that which is remembered is also memorialized.And what is memorialized is what is already dead.To unravel the knot of memory, some called on the archival index, doing so by embracing the novelty and the idealism offered by "the Rainbow Nation". During this period in which a relatively large number of South African artists became visible in the international art scene, bearing witness to the memory of the dim years of apartheid became de rigueur for work seeking admittance into exhibition possibilities.Thus were South African artists in belated forms and ways introjected into the discourse of identity. 4.1 Corps Perdu Until recently the body as a vehicle for art in South Africa was addressed mostly in relation to issues of violence, labour, restriction and resistance. Under the social circumstances of apartheid the postmodern notion of the body as a subjective framework for enacting and projecting desire, identity, sexuality and freedom was often muted by concerns for its physical safety. Such concerns were addressed through resistance against police brutality, juridical regulation, spatial isolation, death, expulsion, bannings (quasi-legal disappearance) and exile. For instance, in the black male and female body, as well as the gay body, three notions of the body converged during apartheid. Under the constant threat of force the black male body was a perverse body: a body without organs, a machine caught in the helotry of the apartheid capitalist I

II 1'1 111: II I

PAUL STOPFORTH ELEGY MIXED MEDIA ON PAPER 149 X 240CM 1981 COURTESY OF DURBAN ART GALLERY

apparatus of cheap labour, a body herded in prison-like camps for months on end without access to the outside world.The black female, on the contrary, was a body of excessive organs, owing mostly to the domesticity of its labour and fantasies of aberrant sexuality often attributed to it.The gay body, on the other hand, was very much an absent body.And as in many social contexts in other parts of the world the gay body was without sex, constantly struggling to free itself from the social norms of heterosexual domination.

SAM NHLENGETHWA IT LEFT HIM COLD COLLAGE, PASTEL, PENCIL AND PAINT ON PAPER 69 X 93.2CM 1990 PHOTO: WAYNE OOSTHUIZEN COURTESY OF STANDARD BANK AFRICAN ART COLLECTION (WITS ART GALLERIES), JOHANNESBURG

All three of these bodies provide a context for how the body was indexed and inscribed in representation up until the transition to democracy began with the release of Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners and the unbanning of the ANC and other parties in 1990. Prior to this period a great proportion (though certainly not all) of contemporary art produced in South Africa took direct interest in the conditions of repression under which South Africa was being governed. Out of this emerged the now unfortunate term "resistance art"' as an almost blanket name for all critically and politically engaged art practice. Whatever the name under which the critique of apartheid violence against the body was made, its public effects elicited a mode of public address that was far from controversial. One of the most powerful instances in which the body made a forceful appearance in contemporary South African art was in the series of graphite drawings by Paul Stopforth based on the autopsy images of the body of Steve Biko, the Black Consciousness leader who died in police detention in 1977.1n Elegy (1980), against a dull reddish-brown background Stopforth draws the prone, naked body of Biko laid out on a bare metal slab, fixed in death. This image of the dead Biko,like that of Andrea Mantegna's great Dead Christ currently in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, is as much an image of the death, trauma and violation of Biko as it is of him as martyred resistance fighter. As such the painting is simultaneously both elegiac and heroic. Sam Nhlengethwa, another South African artist, takes up Stopforth's important attempt to distil the essence of Biko's ethics as a resistance figure in It Left Him Cold (1990). Here, instead of on a mortuary slab, Biko is laid out on the cold damp floor of the bare brick interrogation room with his eyes closed, while his teeth show through his battered mouth.There is a draining of masculine energy from this figure as shown in the shrunken, limp penis, as if the potency of his masculinity was also extirpated by the goons who murdered him.There are, of course, many other images which we can call on in explicating the dialectic of power and the body in contemporary art of South Africa. Certainly, not all images address this question in the realistic and mediatized terms in which the Biko images have been deployed. For example, Ezrom Legae in his eponymous Chicken Series abstracts and transforms the body as a series of allegorical figures between man and chicken. He reads the power of the state as one would an industrial plant of death and sublimates the body into a monstrous hybrid in apartheid's charnel house.

4.2 The Body in Performance If the previous discourse on the body responded to the political effects of totalitarian power of the apartheid state, the post-apartheid body emerged full force to counteract the social realist aspect of resistance art.The terms and strategies of engaging the body as a thematic construct and subject of artistic production took on more personal and elliptical issues, issues bearing directly on subjectivity and individual artists' responses to identity as a discourse of art. Much of the work of interest in this decade of interrogating identity and the body emerged in works that are partly based on performance. In the work of Peet Pienaar and Tracey Rose issues of difference in matters of masculinity, gender, race and sexuality coalesce. Rose belongs to a new generation of young artists who emerged in the late 1990s in the South African contemporary art scene. Rose's works, like those of a number of young South African artists dealing with questions of identity, owe great debt to the post-minimalist, conceptual work of African-American artists such as Adrian Piper, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, Fred Wilson and David Hammons who defined this terrain of critical practice in the 1970s and 80s. Until recently Rose's signature works dealt with physiological material such as hair (both its materiality and texture) and skin colour, both of which bear on apartheid's obsession with racial categories as ciphers of purity and impurity, difference and hybridity. In erasing the features of a determinism which converts "colouredness" into the abnormal and exotic, the apartheid racial grid had to struggle against the indeterminacy of race as the stable ground of identity while also attending to the obsolescence of its own racial theories.The very fact of apartheid's taxonomic racial classification and invention of"colouredness" as a third category that lies between European and African identities, or as the intermixture of the stark black or white racial scheme, remains a critical gap constantly addressed in Rose's work. In the beginning her interrogations foregrounded elements of her "colouredness" in order to bring to crisis its inadequacy as a marker of identity. In these probings, hair remained the material of the greatest test. Rose's early work comprised fuzzy, technologically low-grade videos, passive-aggressive performances and psychologically charged objects dealing with the female body as it converged with issues of race and gender. Her work exists in the gaps between conceptual art and performance, between political discourse and sociological investigation, between relations of nature and culture. In her work she keeps a clean and precise focus on the investigation of social relations of power,gender, race, stereotype and history, and in a more profound way on the existential melancholia of her place as a "coloured" woman, neither black nor white, in an intensely race-conscious society. However, Rose does not give us easily consumed narratives of otherness and disenfranchisement. In her work the ambiguous nature of"colouredness", that which is neither black nor white, neither whole nor pure, neither Afrikaner nor African,the utterly hybrid and other is not beside the point insofar as she does not disavow the complications of this racial formation in South Africa's discourse on the body. If"colouredness" does not define the totality of her practice, it does lend it a conceptual framework in which to critique the falsity of any pure relation to a group. The anxiety of difference often evoked in works like Rose's has been the bane of much contemporary art of the last two decades whereby artists (women, minorities, and gays and lesbians) have responded in representation to questions of power often deployed by the dominant culture to keep at bay certain forms of expression outside the mainstream. But by playing and twisting different positions Rose does not offer simplistic or straightforward narratives that could be easily appropriated by those who may wish to make mere politically correct pleadings for her. Instead her variation on the well-worn theme of race and identity comes through the most diverse and incongruous means. I recall here two key early works. For her degree show at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg (1996), she presented an untitled sculpture fashioned out of a large block of ice and rendered in rainbow colours (an allusion to the "Rainbow Nation"). The perversity of this sculpture, which was not presented in a refrigerated case, is that the liquid came partly from her urine.As the liquid melted, it sent a strong pungent odour through the gallery.What COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

TRACEY ROSE SPAN II PERFORMANCE 1997 PHOTO: MIKE HALL COURTESY OF THE GOODMAN GALLERY. JOHANNESBURG

does this scatological liquid reference other than the body? In a sense by crafting and monumentalizing waste, Rose refers concretely to questions of abjection, placing a focus on the body in all its degraded and brutalized forms under apartheid, cautioning the slogan-mongers on the dangers of accepting an invented present that disavows the lessons of the past. If the urine and its flow marks the gallery (the sanctified institution of national culture) with its unpleasant scent, a second untitled work comprising copies of birth certificates of her family inserted into existing display cabinets with traditional African art objects reverses the terms of her critique from the bodily to the indexical, back to the juridical definition of the social self. In the certificates it is revealed that some members of her family were classified under different racial groups, with some black and others "coloured". That Rose and her parents were classified differently from the rest of her family reveals the point of the twisted logic that assigned people an a priori status in the hierarchy of social belonging and the attending privileges that accrue or are withdrawn. In this intervention, which recalls similar work by Adrian Piper, Rose wanted to draw attention to and analogy between how "coloured" South Africans who are neither African nor European were classified and how objects of art from various African cultures often arrive miscategorized in the ethnographic display of museums. Peet Pienaar's performance-based work operates under a kind of low intensity aggression across the terrain of race (as an Afrikaner), sexuality (as a gay artist), gender (in relation to masculinity) and identity (in terms of nationality). I shall not go into the controversies that have attended the reception of some of Pienaar's public propositions. But since the mid-I990s when he enacted in several performances the role of the heroic Springbok rugby player â&#x20AC;&#x201D; that icon of Afrikaner masculinity â&#x20AC;&#x201D; by transforming himself into a living public sculpture, whereby he stood hours on end on a plinth in the South African National Gallery dressed in the uniform of the national rugby team, Pienaar has focused his attention on complex questions of subjectivity. Pienaar extended these performances into other arenas, often transforming the nature of his depiction of the hero by donning different garbs.ln one performance, Untitled,(1997) at the Hanel Gallery in Cape Town,the figure of the heroic rugby player is dressed in bottle green sequined suit and tie ensemble. With a slight tweaking of the conservative demeanor and decorum of the rugby hero,the figure is transformed instantaneously into an icon of camp and flamboyance. Pienaar's allegories of masculinity and gender, citizenship and nation, race and body touch on a number of questions. On one hand these serial performances can be understood in terms of conventional portraiture.And if these performances are portraits, I mean it in the sense that to portray something is not just to symbolize it, but to have it stand as surrogate for both the real and ideal. However,these portraits do not cohere either as the real or ideal, or as a collective portrait in the way that returning heroes of a nation are understood to represent the collective body. Instead, in these performances of the hero it appears that Pienaar was interested in three critical issues: nationality, that terrain of inclusion and exclusion familiar to all South Africans under the apartheid construction of citizenship; masculinity, under which rituals of homosocial and sexual aggression are played out on the sports field; and cultural patrimony, in which the museum serves as a repository of collectivized culture.The convergence of all three areas as charged territories of affects of power remains a central discursive position in many of Pienaar's performances.Some works may be seen as social agit-prop, while to many they raise concern as to the nature of the body in social and cultural discourse. To contextualize his performances, it is worth remembering how in advancing their racialized policies successive apartheid governments appropriated sports as tools of propaganda in the years when the country was under boycott.The Springbok rugby team in particular, because of its denial of access to non-white players, became a flash point in the country's history of segregation.The most damning demonstration of this policy occurred before an international audience during the Springbok's tour of New Zealand in 1982 (during the infamous "flour bomb" attack in which anti-apartheid fans disrupted the tour by throwing white flour onto the playing pitch).Yet in 1995, the Springboks became miraculously transformed as a COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

symbol of national reconciliation when the team won the world rugby championship. Under the banner of the "Rainbow Nation" and with Mandela leading the cheerleading on the playing field, a team formerly seen as a symbol of racist ideology was suddenly recast. Pienaar's penchant for incisive provocation is very much in evidence in a controversy over a performance he proposed for an exhibition in Cape Town in 2000.1n the piece, centred on circumcision,the uncircumcised Pienaar proposed to stage the public removal of his foreskin by a black surgeon. In this performance he was after two things: the concept of African masculinity which is achieved through the coming of age ritual undergone by Xhosa males,and the relationship of taboo to culture, and the symbolic legitimation of cultural identity. Here is how Pienaar described the performance: "Concept: In African tradition you are not a man unless you are circumcised, it is also a token of initiation as a man into society.The tradition is highlighted in the Xhosa culture where'manhood' or 'initiation' rituals include circumcision, a practice which has become increasingly controversial in South African society, due to the deaths and infections which often accompany the ritual. While, in traditional culture, circumcision would be performed in a group ritual for young adults, in white culture it is an embarrassing thing to get circumcised when you are an adult and it is an operation that would normally be private and confidential.Thus, by showing the performance live on the Net, in front of an audience, I am highlighting the strange tension that exists in this country between tradition (traditional concepts of masculinity) and technology (new concepts of masculinity). By auctioning the foreskin I am exploring how new concepts of masculinity are built around money and capital worth as opposed to the tradition and physical."13 4.3 The Indexical Body If the social body has been sublimated in a penance for the physical body, how has the analysis of the body in contemporary artistic production in South Africa been unraveled in other modes of representation? As I have tried to show,the anxiety around the body and the preoccupation with the historical norms and signs that swarm around it have been incentive for all kinds of critical investigations.These have included the treatment of the body as an archival and indexical referent; as historically determined in mediatized relations of discourse, whether in the recall to abjection or to criminality; or in juridical methods of capture and confinement meted out by the state.The indexical therefore exists between norms of inscription and exposure,surveillance and disappearance. One of the truisms of apartheid control of bodies where all social relations were submitted to regulative oversight (one important example was the Population Control Act) is the degree to which the apartheid state was a panoptic apparatus. In this context, the trace of the body, that is to say its index, has accumulated a remarkable inventory of designations in the depository of images of the South African self. In this vast accumulation, images of different kinds address or implicate the public in reckoning with the South African past, whether hidden, private or public. The historical determination of these images has been part of a broader debate in South Africa.The index thus relates to images not just as stable referential sources but also as icons of contested history. Candice Breitz and Senzeni Marasela are two artists who have addressed this indexical relationship of the body to public reception. Of the two artists Breitz has been the most controversial." In an earlier moment of 1980s postmodernism Breitz would have been referred to as an "appropriationist", an artist who takes and reconfigures images from the mass media into critiques of such images.She has done so by going further back to an earlier period of modernism in the I 920s when the montage form in Berlin and Russia was deployed as a formal technique of mechanical reproduction (here we think of Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera) and a form of media critique (especially the work of Berlin Dada artist John Heartfield). But it is to Hannah Hoch that her first body of work in this mode owes the greatest debt. Hoch's seminal From on

PEET PIENAAR CIRCUMCISION PERFORMANCE 2000 COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

Ethnographic Museum (1924-1930), constructed in a montage of fragments of body parts,African and Oceanic masks and sculptures from various photographic sources, is echoed in a similar manner in Breitz's Rainbow Series (1996).

CANDICE BREITZ GHOST SERIES # 4 C-PRINT 101.6 X 68.6CM 1996 COURTESY OF SONNABEND GALLERY NEW YORK

In this early work Breitz focused on images of semi-naked African women bodies in ethnic regalia published in postcard formats and usually circulated within the realm of tourism. Marasela on the other hand has focused on images mostly derived from photographs that come from documentary sources, and almost always centered on black self-determination. Marasela chooses instead the domestic space as the site of her critical analysis, as a counterpoint to the overdetermined public space of witnessing and testimony that has accompanied the transition to democracy. In a sense, the indexical body is addressed in two different systems of representation, one bearing the mark of primitive exoticism,and the other attributes of modern political subjectivity. In Breitz's images (the Rainbow Series and Ghost Series, both 1996) it is the ethnographic inscription of the black female body within colonial and apartheid discourse that serves as the raison d'ĂŞtre of her critical pursuit. In Marasela's work images are taken from archival newspaper accounts and embedded in everyday materials found in township homes,such as tray cloths, doilies and hankies.Well known photographs of the 1976 Soweto uprising, the death of Steve Biko, etc (especially in the Colonial Tray Cloths, 1997), become foils for her meditation on the status of the black public self and its subjective struggle for sovereignty. In Breitz's reworked (by means of cutting and collaging, or whiting-out with Tippex) and rephotographed images, the ethnographic body morphs into a cheerful vehicle for exotic and pornographic pleasure or dissipates into nameless,faceless ghosts excised or blotted out by the corrosive fluid of whiteness. Marasela, on the other hand, is much more interested in acts of bearing witness, in the nature of sacrifice and heroism, loss and absence particularly in her treatment of archival photographic images of the black struggle under apartheid. Such works as Marasela's address not only public memory and memorialization, remembrance and amnesia of the struggle, but also mourning and loss. Pointing out the differences between Breitz's and Marasela's accounts of the indexical body is not to oppose them to each other, whereby one is understood as reverential and the other irreverent. Neither is it to privilege one form of usage over the other. Rather, what is at stake within each of their oeuvres is the opening of other avenues on how the monstrous and the abject are confronted, while leaving unresolved the truth of images which take up new roles in the discourse of art. For instance, Breitz's Rainbow Series and Ghost Series foreground a number of interpretive relationships between the black body and the gaze. But here it is clear that the gaze being called into question is the apartheid gaze. One cannot be so sure of the claim by Octavio Zaya that"[t]he Rainbow Series gestures deconstructively at romanticized notions of hybridity. It resigns itself to the general impossibility of coherent subjectivity (since the subject is arguably always hybrid)."15Though Zaya is correct when he notes that in a mixed, multicultural society such as South Africa, there can be no essentialisms around identity. And even those identities that fantasize about their putative purity are almost always modified by the merest existence of an other in the culture, such that the hybrid body becomes an ontological fact. But theory sometimes falls short when the artwork proves contrary to available evidence. Especially in South Africa, there can be no innocent uses of images of what Henry Louis Gates calls the racial self, for this self, transformed into a mere indexical body, is a monstrous form as the Rainbow Series and Ghost Series clearly show. As concerns her artistic project in these series, Breitz herself understands the degree to which theory may never trump what is being looked at, images that need more than the support of enunciative cleverness to achieve a penetrating intelligibility, especially given that the montage of body parts from pornographic magazines and ethnographic postcards does not come with any fait accompli. Breitz's nuanced exploration of the tension inherent in the forced interpellation of a group of bodies derived from different archives with their own historical baggage of violence (as the images of pornography shows) and those invested with other historical relationships (as with the ethnographic postcards) is a better clue on how to read her intervention. She explores the quandary of identity in a less definitive way, in order to insist that the COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

act of looking involves, also, procedures of translation. Here, it is the translative act that determines the nature of the suture performed by the artist through the cut of the montage implement. She writes:"The negotiation of the cut or border between two elements in a photomontage is ... an act of translation." But she does not treat the statement as a definitive declaration. In fact she qualifies it by asking whether the "translator or photomonteur" can assume that "it is necessary or possible or desirable to translate one element invisibly into the next"." In my earlier critique of the series, my fervent belief was no,the "translator or photomonteur" cannot make such an assumption. She can in formal terms, but in ethical terms a different problem arises. Marasela's deployment of archival photographs of the liberation struggle is also confronted by its own ethical limit. Sympathies with black African attempts to reclaim even a nominal form of historical visibility notwithstanding, we are forced to be wary of the easy translation of archival footages of the liberation struggle as empowering instruments of memory and history, identity and subjectivity.We are wary precisely because of the propaganda value invested in images of the struggle. During apartheid such images were examples of terrorists at work,while for activists such images served as a spur of energy and encouragement to continue the struggle. But like Breitz, Marasela does not treat the archive unequivocally as a source of truth.The archive is as much a constructed source of knowledge, power and authority as it is a site of historical contestation. Marasela has commented on the motivation behind her usage of archival photographs against the persistent instruments of disremembering in black communities.Asked by an interviewer about the reason behind her interest in archival images, she says: "Not much of the history of black people has been recorded. Photography is one of the few places where you'll find this history. It's quite a prominent archive. In this sense, I see myself as an historian.Artists have an important role to play in telling stories about our history.A lot of black artists are running away from these images.They're scared to use them. But we can't only have white artists telling these stories. I also use photography because I want to emphasize the realness of the events I'm dealing with. I wanted to bring home the fact that these are not fictions." Nothing could be more revealing in this statement than the way it mirrors the battle of representations and testimonies that was unleashed over the long, slow process of the TRC hearings staged in South Africa over a period of two years.And as in the TRC,in Marasela's resort to the archive, it is not just images of white violation of the black racial self that she works with, but also black violations. One of her early works, Stompie Seibei, Died / 989,Age 14 (1998), makes this clear. Stompie Seipei was the young boy connected to

SENZENI MARASELA UNTITLED CLOTH, SILVER TRAYS 1997 COURTESY OF IZIKO SOUTH AFRICAN NATIONAL GALLERY

Winnie Mandela's Mandela Football Club whose members were later indicted as being responsible for his killing.This image of lost youth and innocence serves both a mnemonic function as a memorial and as an indictment of the political corruption and abuse of power of Winnie Mandela. In her continuous probing of the depths of the archive, it is revealed as a complicated site. In it we can glimpse the ambivalent mixture of catharsis and trauma.As such the indexical body in Breitz's and Marasela's works exists as a meditation on the history of representation and the relationship between images and ideology, between history and propaganda, between the racial and gendered self and the hybrid body. 4.4 Vigil of the Monstrous Body: The Sleep of Reason and the Owl of Minerva In what ways has the monstrous body been constructed in South Africa? One of the earliest formulations of the rebuke against the post-apartheid obsession with identity and reconciliation was launched before the second elections occurred in 1999. Disgrace, a novel by JM Coetzee, South Africa's second Nobel Laureate in literature, served this notice. Coetzee's novel opens this discordant note with ferocity and by means of pure disavowal.The novel has been attacked and praised with equal vigour, neither of which diminishes nor obscures the cold-blooded detachment of his depiction of change gone completely wrong. Disgrace is written against the backdrop of a historical wrong,and through it addresses the ethics of living with forgiveness and reconciliation born from that,The chief symbol of this investigation is Lucy, a young, idealistic white woman living on an isolated homestead in the Eastern Cape. Lucy's small farm, which she shares with her dogs,abuts the plot of a taciturn black farmer named Petrus. But when she is brutally raped by three young black men,one of whom,Pollux, is the relative of her neighbour Petrus, the quiet idyll of life on the farm begins to come apart at the seams. It is a crime illumined by its callousness and brutality. And Coetzee in almost cynical fashion pushes it to near breaking point. In his distillation of the relationship between the heirs of a historical wrong and the ones who will now inherit their kingdom, we are presented with the stark choices of reconciliation. In her searing anguish and deep violation one can see in Lucy's rape and violation elements of revenge and retribution. But it is the retribution that focuses the story and serves as a larger metaphor in South Africa's struggle to overcome its colonial and apartheid legacies. Lucy, who became pregnant from the rape, refuses against the entreaties of her father — the disgraced professor of communication and opera enthusiast David Lurie, on the run from his own shame for sexually violating a young female student under his tutorial — to press charges or contemplate abortion.The child she carries is part of the cost of her self-abnegation, a way of giving up forms of white justice which in the past oppressed the entire country. Lucy's unborn illegitimate child is then the yet to emerge monster of post-apartheid shotgun marriage.The fear of barely concealed black revenge is at the crux of this story of depravity and calculated humiliation.The loss of Lucy's honour is in a larger way part of South Africa's journey from the tundra of unfeeling specific to apartheid and colonialism to post-apartheid catharsis which has not arrived,for the trauma is pressed too deeply into the social body and psyche. Lucy's child is the monstrous South African body writ large. Disgrace is equal part ethical and moral reflection, a kind of soft theory of power and justice. It is also a pessimistic view, the renunciation of the simplistic and pietistic discourse of the "Rainbow Nation" and "Truth and Reconciliation" in an ideologically and historically divided country. Spare, unflinching, at times even sadistic, Coetzee's irrealistic novel is the counter-power to the idealism that refuses to address the realism of the post-apartheid social body. But its pessimism also indicts it, in so far as it paints too limited a view of the tense peace that has succoured South Africa's transition. Coming at the heels of his emigration to Australia — seen by some as a self-serving parting shot at a country obsessed without end with its mongrelized, violent and racial volatility but which has infused Coetzee's dry, standoffish writing with a mixture of Kafka and Beckett — his larger project remains how to write novels that are ethically powerful but not moralistically simple-minded.Whether he succeeds or fails requires careful reading, reading between the lines of his bloodless, cauterized prose.Yet the themes of his novels COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

feed constantly at the troughs of the South African pathology of power and abuse.This has led Coetzee to characterize South African literature as "a less than fully human literature, unnaturally preoccupied with power and the torsions of power, unable to move from elementary relations of contestation, domination, and subjugation ... it is exactly the kind of literature one would expect people to write from a prison."18 Coetzee's political allegories notwithstanding, and in all his works' consistent attempts to slip the grip of the realism of much South African representation, be it on the ethics of memory,the indeterminacy and mutability of identity or the social role of art, artists and writers like him continue to labour from inside the frosty heart of South Africa's dysfunctional social body, and out of it we have been bequeathed some of the most self-absorbed and searing art of any nation. If Coetzee's Disgrace gives us a glimpse of what the victor's or shall we say the victim's justice may look like when it comes to pass,Jane Alexander has been from the very beginning of her career intent on questioning distortions in the conduct of power.Alexander inherits from Coetzee an austerity and starkness of delivery. Moreover, in her depictions of the human form,and much like in Coetzee's lean figuration and dry realism, what is constantly frustrated and consistently attacked is sentimentality. In casting grave doubts on the healthy nature of the human form, her sculpture not only engages"power and torsions of power", it treats the body with such skepticism as to undermine all qualities of humanness,Alexander is a unique and singular figure among the generation of artists who emerged in South Africa in the 1980s. Hers was never a revolutionary or resistance art. Introverted and notoriously slow in her production, she works outside the circuits of fashion and is uninterested in fleeting fads and styles. She has remained consistent in her interest in traditional figuration — be it the human or animal form — through careful modeling, casting and sculpting of her figures. Even when this fidelity to qualities of traditional sculpture may sometimes appear jejune, especially in her consistent suppression of abstraction or geometry in her figures and forms, the works remain resonant in their emotional and psychological disturbance, as well as the weird realism of her hybrid imagery. A distinguishing effect of her work lies as much in its rigorous formal exploration of the figurative qualities of the human form as its organization in nests of visually dramatic tableaux. It is in the presentation of the sculptures that Alexander's hybrid figures — part man, part animal — assert their force and authority. Openly confrontational, her noteworthy early output includes Dog (1984-5), an unsentimental mongrelized human and dog, and Untitled (1985-6), a life-size seated figure whose cranial, facial deformity and blighted, wrinkled skin, like that of a Dalmatian, present us with images of the monstrous and grotesque.These sculptures are difficult to look at, often wearing — in their flayed, blotchy skin, crushed bones and mongrelized limbs — signs of their trauma.This trauma, like that of catastrophe in Siopis' and Kentridge's work,can be located as the scene of violence of the broader political culture.Yet, it is important to note that Alexander's realistic work extends beyond the history of apartheid, even if, contextually, it is apartheid that permits and authorizes its inaugural reading. However, the tradition of critique that is part of Alexander's work can be traced much further back, specifically to the work of Spanish artist Francisco Goya. For example her photomontages and sculptural tableaux reference Goya's great work,the group of etchings, drawings and aquatints known as Los Caprichos, in which the Spanish master combines biting satire with social critique.The subject of Los Caprichos concerns the excesses and state of Spanish society towards the end of its decline under Carlos IV. Exemplifying and distilling the thematic of the eighty plates is the etching El sueno de la razon produce monstrous (The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, 1797-8). In this picture, a figure that represents reason falls asleep on a table, while all around it hover bats, owls and a startled, alert feline crouched behind the sleeper's feet. One can view in this image the Hegelian idea of negation of reason in which the Owl of Minerva flies at dusk to signal the abyss of reason and wisdom. In Hegel's thesis, reason — the philosopher's reason — is always post histoire; it only returns after the event, after the decline of liberty, justice and freedom. South Africa's narcolepsy under apartheid is the thematic cognate of this abyss and decline. Here Benjamin's angel meets COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

Hegel's owl. If Benjamin's angel could perform no redemptive task, Hegel's owl is always belated. But what is decidedly absent is the rooster of post-enlightenment French revolution that determines a different course of history.Though South Africa was governed and often arrested by the constant declarations of states of emergency, by the end of the decade the course of its history would be determined by the heroic — in the political sphere — and relentless struggle waged — especially by artists and writers by recourse to the social realist ideals of"resistance art" representations — to bring apartheid to an end. Apartheid's monsters are the subjects of Alexander's great sculpture, Butcher Boys (1985-6).Alexander has also used photographs of the sculptures to produce a series of photomontages that address the condition of alienation under apartheid. However,it is the physical specimen itself that leaves little doubt of the work's intentions. Life-size in scale, the sculpture upon encounter is immediately present in its frontality. In different sitting poses on a wooden bench,Alexander stages a veritable conclave of spectacular bodily deformations. While the taut, well-formed bodies (perhaps from a lifetime spent at the gym or performing virile activities) of the figures are human,the heads, like those of the Minotaur trapped in Minos' labyrinth, have attributes of horned animals such as a buffalo, bull and ram.These hybrid creatures are human and non-human, man and animal, monsters and ordinary people.After nearly two decades, Butcher Boys has lost none of its disquieting effect of threatening potentiality, as if at any moment the monsters of apartheid's past might again waken in the dusk of reason's termination. In spite of the tough-minded attitude of the work, it is nevertheless distinct from Disgrace's apostasy. For while Alexander's sculptures and photomontages allude to reason's decline which in 1948 brought the National Party with its ideology of apartheid to power, Coetzee's anti-rooster is the noncrowing that has refused to usher in the sobriety of the post-apartheid age of reconciliation. This impossibility founds the basis of the contradiction captured in Disgrace, and which critics of the novel charge as Coetzee's disavowal of the integrity of reconciliation.Additionally, the fate of Lucy in Disgrace invites speculation as to the concordance of the novel's theme of irreconcilability with the old political slogan,"one settler, one bullet",formerly the central credo of the Pan Africanist Congress. Is the novel intimating the ultimate realizability of that slogan, which would then mean a vital harm to reconciliation? Understood thus, post-apartheid social relation between black and white,African and European, Zulu and Afrikaner is not solved by reconciliation. Rather it is shot through by a struggle for power and domination.The attack and rape on the farm symbolize this. In fact, this brutal event is a knife driven deep in the heart of the "rainbow nation" utopia. And where does the logic of this tale lead if not to reanimating "one settler, one bullet" as the true outcome of life in South Africa after apartheid? So in 2004 the poll of South Africans illuminates the topography on which the separation of relations has been engaged: the noncoherence and disunification of the "rainbow nation". Whatever its limits may be today to critical observers, art and the politics of elucidating its relationship to the broader social body have been constants in the history of art making in South Africa.The very conjunction of this fact in the popular tropes of"resistance art" makes clear the near impossibility of any detachment from the social context within which South African art has been formed: between ideology and formalism, politics and representation.And if politics as such, according to the critics of"resistance art", is unrepresentable, neither is art possible without the accompanying ethical questions artists attempt to wrest from it. Art and politics, it would seem,are perpetually embedded in the conundrum,and the deepening distance among the polity promises another age of art that will know no respite from its deep self-absorption and alienation. However,the spectacular combination of art in a biopolitics of body and subjectivity, identity and citizenship, gender and race, history and memory engendered and demonstrated in the work of artists working in the post-historical conditions of today's South Africa delimits another terrain of power and possibility. In short it can be argued that no significant work of art has been produced in South Africa that has not at the same time confronted the obdurate edifice of the politics of the country's divided memory. Consequently,the past is no longer a foreign country — divided between Europe and Africa — but a native land. COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

I. I have borrowed this title from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's book, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999). 2. See Annie E Coombes, History After Apartheid:Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 3. For further articulation of this point see my "Remembering of Things Past Memory and the Archive" in Trauma and Memory:Cross-Cultural Perspectives, Franz Kaltenbeck and Peter Weibel (eds)(Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 2000) pp 19-34. 4. David Goldblatt, South Africa:The Structure ofThings Then (New York:The Monnacelli Press, 1998) p 186. 5. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language,AM Sheridan (trans)(New York: Pantheon Books, 1982) p 129. 6. See Rosalind E Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), pp 7-8. 7. JM Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (Johannesburg: Radix and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), p 49. 8. For an insightful interpretation of Benjamin's small fragment on Paul Klee's Angelus Novus, see Giorgio Agamben,"Walter Benjamin and the Demonic: Happiness and Historical Redemption" in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, Daniel Heller-Roazen (trans) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp 138-159. 9. See Walter Benjamin,"Theses on the Philosophy of History" in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Hannah Arendt (ed)(New York: Schoken Books, 1985), pp 257-258. 10. See Rosalind Krauss,"The Rock":William Kentridge's Drawings for Projection in October #92,Spring 2000, pp 3-35. I. I have borrowed this term from Charity Scribner's book, Requiem for Communism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003). 12. For one of the most sustained and cogent critiques of "resistance art", see Albie Sachs' seminal essay "Preparing Ourselves for Freedom" in David Elliot (ed), Art from South Africa (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art Oxford and Thames and Hudson, 1990), pp 10-15. Originally published as an in-house position paper for an ANC seminar on culture, this text has since acquired a legacy as one of the blunt instruments against all facile and dogmatic appropriation of art and culture for political ends. 13. From text of proposal written by Pienaar, sent by him during an email correspondence. 14. For a lengthy critique of aspects of Breitz's work,see my essay,"Reframing the Black Subject: Ideology and Fantasy in Contemporary South African Representation" in Reading the Contemporary:African Art from Theory to the Marketplace, Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor (eds)(London and Cambridge: in IVA and MIT Press, 1999). 15. Octavio Zaya,"After the Subject" in Candice Breitz: Cuttings, Martin Sturm and Renate Plochl (eds), (Linz: OK Center for Contemporary Art, 2001), p 41. 16. Candice Breitz,"Notes on Photomontage" in Candice Breitz: Cuttings, p 77. 17. Senzeni Marasela, interview with Rory Bester in Democracy's Images:Photography and Visual Art After Apartheid (Umea: Bildmuseet, 1998), p 119. 18. JM Coetzee, quoted in James Wood,Parables and Prizes, New Republic Online, May 10 2001.

JANE ALEXANDER BUTCHER BOYS (DETAIL) PLASTER, OIL PAINT, BONE, HORNS, WOODEN BENCH 128.5 X 213.5 X 88.5CM 1985-6 PHOTO: MARIO TODESCHINI COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

TOWARDS AN 'ADVERSARIAL AESTHETICS'

To say that identity is fictional in this tenth year of South Africa's democracy may sound a little preposterous. After all, the celebration of a decade of freedom presents an ideal opportunity to take stock of the ways in which identities have been affected by this freedom: how our identities are openly fluid and complex now, rather than fixed in the binaries that apartheid tried so hard to uphold; how they may be claimed now, rather than conferred; how they may be formed through active self-definition now, rather than through perpetual resistance and mobilization. Indeed, no less than three international exhibitions showcasing South African art of the last ten years explicitly engage the notion of identity: New Identities in Bochum,Germany; The ID of South African Artists in Amsterdam; and A Decode of Democracy: Witnessing South Africa, which opened in Boston in April and aims to "examine ways that identity has been defined, searching for means of expression that are more personal in experience and universal in understanding")These shows all seem to foreground identity as complex and multiple, in stark contrast to the apartheid era that policed identity in closed-off categories. These exhibitions mark our shifting understanding of identity. In the 1970s and 1980s identity politics — "the tendency to base one's politics on a sense of identity"2 — have tended to essentialize identity into distinct categories, a necessary political strategy of mobilization and resistance that still haunts the concept of identity today wherever it is posited as fixed and immutable. Similarly apartheid, with its frenzy of prohibitive laws and regulations, was a desperate attempt to simplify, reduce and discipline identity into submission.With its focus on race and segregation, apartheid, but also the liberation struggle in South Africa, managed "to mask [complex configurations of identity]" while "an over-simplified discourse of rainbow nationalism" has tried to do the same in the post-apartheid era.3 In this reflective moment that the commemoration of a decade of democracy demands from us, we celebrate our multiple identities, our freedom to define who we are.We also realize, of course, that identity has never been anything but complex and multiple. And yet, the present focus on identity also invites a different reading. For what else does our obsession with identity reveal than our utter inability to contain it? The liquidity of this concept — the many ways in which it spills over boundaries and seeps out of categories — bespeaks not simply its complexity but, more than that, signals perhaps its end.The way in which we are always in excess of our identities — whether chosen or bestowed on us — always an imperfect fit with the many definitions that attempt to represent us, reveals identity's overwhelming insufficiency, the fiction of all identity. Add to this the chilling recognition that identity is at core a concept demanding sameness,4 meant to breed harmony through exclusion, and we are awakened to its troubling history of conflict and discrimination. Even when it is mobilized more positively in the name of political activism,"the signs of sameness have degenerated readily into emblems of supposedly essential or immutable difference".5 As Paul Gilroy points out,"Calculating the relationship between identity and difference, sameness and otherness is an intrinsically political operation."6 Similarly,Jorella Andrews argues that when questions of identity arise,"pertinent and troublesome,they are inevitably symptomatic of some disorder, some dis-ease or desire. On the one hand they point to certain discontinuities, struggles, anxieties and needs ... On the other hand, they indicate certain insufficiencies within the cultural realms of language, thought and representation."2 One way in which this exhibition, Personal Affects: Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art may be read, then, is to say that it recognizes the limitations and the troublesome history of identity — and perhaps its intellectual bankruptcy — and wants to move beyond all that. It follows a trajectory that is attentive to the very ruptures that reveal the insufficiency of identity,foregrounding the excessive, chaotic, contradictory and subtle histories of our most intimate imaginings. Bypassing grand questions of who we are in the here and now of 2004, many of the artists on this show accept that we may never know that. They embrace loss, absence and becoming rather than being; they welcome the fragment, the provisional, the question, rather than the answer. I I

We are, then, in the presence of what has been described,frustratingly so for lack of a better word, as a post-identitarian world. Despite the usual vagueness of affixes pre- and post-, post-identity brings with it a certain vacuity that is, for once, enabling and productive. It makes space for uncertainty and incompleteness, it opens itself up to constant mutation. Like the family of"posts" to which it belongs (post-black, post-race, post-ethnicity, post-human, post-corporeal), post-identity carries within it a question and a search; like all these terms it signals a departure, but no arrival. 2 The 'Post-' Moment: Theoretical Musings This is not to say that identity does not matter. Of course identity matters very much in a world still structured by race and other discriminatory practices.8 A case in point is a recent documentary film about the South African art world, The Luggage is Still Labeled: Blackness in South African Art (2003),9 which showed that a very real perception exists that art and educational institutions are still besieged by racist prejudice in South Africa, leading to a situation where access to education, art collections and curatorial and critical positions remains largely restricted to whites. However, despite the fact that blackness is interpreted quite loosely by the many interviewees in the film — ranging from performative to political readings of the term — the film ultimately reinforces a monolithic understanding of the term "blackness" by seeing it as the root cause of discrimination.And while this may be an accurate reflection of the apartheid policies that a democratic South Africa is trying to dismantle, it also manages to reduce identity to essence. In this way, subtleties of identity are completely flattened. Gender, sexuality, personal histories, geographical location (rural or urban contexts), generational schisms, economic brackets, training opportunities — all those aspects that situate each of us differently — are completely erased from the film in its rush to reduce blackness to a basic category of exclusion.What emerges is an unsatisfactory and simplistic representation of the problems that afflict South Africa's cultural life. I raise this here not to detract from the value of the film. It presents trenchant criticism, albeit reductive, which deserves our attention and action. But the film does fall prey to what Diana Fuss has called, in her now classic study of identity, a "synecdochical tendency to see only one part of a subject's identity (usually the most visible part) and to make that part stand for the whole".1° It goes without saying that this "hierarchy of identities [that] is set up within each speaking subject"' will be insufficient to capture the complexity of subjects; it points ultimately to the fiction of identity's ability to pinpoint"who we are", noting that we may never answer that question with certainty. Intellectually, post-identity is indebted to a number of other terms that have, in the last few years, called for a move beyond identity and a brief mention of those terms is perhaps in order here. In the art world, the term post-black was made popular when curator Thelma Golden used it in relation to her Freestyle show at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York in 2001. In the catalogue to the exhibition Golden wrote that"[the term post-black] was characterized by artists who were adamant about not being labelled as 'black' artists, though their work was steeped, in fact deeply interested, in redefining complex notions of blackness".I2 While there is reason to be suspicious of Golden's catchy phrase — how can one be postblack if one identifies as black, and if that blackness structures one's position in the world? — the term was significant for articulating a desire to move beyond identity politics based in blackness. The notion of"post-black" emerged into a climate where it has become commonplace to say that race has no scientific basis and that it is socially constructed.Yet despite this, the tenacity of race continues to constitute our world. Post-black, like post-identity, encapsulates this conundrum: it is at once desiring to dismiss race, yet it cannot but acknowledge its formative role — both positive and negative — in subjective experience. COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

It is for this reason that scholars such as Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks and Paul Gilroy are calling not simply for an end to blackness (or whiteness for that matter), but for a rejection of race in total. In her book Desiring Whiteness (2000),Seshadri-Crooks urges us to give up on the "inaugural signifier of race" — which she terms Whiteness — that "implicates us all equally in a logic of difference".I3 Seshadri-Crooks' work has particular relevance for a visual art exhibition since she defines race as a scopic regime,"a practice of visibility rather than a scientific, anthropological or cultural theory",14 and then suggests that we find visual ways to confound race as bodily reference. Since race is primarily an aesthetic practice that has to be disrupted, she searches for an "adversarial aesthetics that will throw racial signification into disarray",I5 a concept that is interesting in our present discussion because, as we will see below, post-identity similarly asks us to see differently, think differently and signify differently. In his Against Race (2000), Paul Gilroy finds that while there is clearly a crisis of what he terms "raciology" — brought on by a variety of factors ranging from gene-oriented or genomic challenges to the concept of "race" to medical technologies that have altered our understanding of the body and consequently of racial difference — alliances based on race have nevertheless strengthened in the last few years. For Gilroy "the elaborate cultural and ideological work that goes into producing and reproducing [the idea of'race] is more visible than ever before' and it is the transparency of its laboured construction that reveals to us its insufficiency and the fact that it is ethically indefensible, as Gilroy puts it. Both Gilroy, who foresees a utopian state of"planetary humanism" where race will no longer matter, and Seshadri-Crooks, who proclaims "an adversarial aesthetics" that will subvert racial looking, describe a world already changed to its very fibre, but it is the journey to that point that is captured by the term "post-race". Like post-identity, it expresses the desire to move on and to think differently, without necessarily proclaiming an arrival. Almost a decade ago historian David Hollinger coined the concept of post-ethnicity in his book Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (I 995).While ethnicity is perhaps less visible and therefore less directly determining than race, it nevertheless still shapes our identities and therefore deserves some mention in outlining the trajectory of post-identity. According to Hollinger, post-ethnicity "favors voluntary over involuntary affiliations, balances an appreciation for communities of descent with a determination to make room for new communities,and promotes solidarities of wide scope that incorporate people with different ethnic and racial backgrounds".I7 Hollinger preferred to use affiliation rather than identity because for him identity "implies fixity and givenness" whereas affiliation implies "a greater measure of flexibility" consistent with a post-ethnic awareness.I8 Of course one could take issue with Hollinger's understanding of identity, especially in the light of Judith Butler's later influential writings on identity as performative and inconclusive, which is obviously pertinent to our notion of post-identity. But as far as post-ethnicity promoted choice of affiliation and communities of consent and, therefore, allowed for change and movement, it is integral to the notion of post-identity and the departure that it heralds. However, like Butler's theorisation of performative identity, post-identity does not describe what we are, but what we do and what we become, recurrently.I9 In addition, postidentity expresses a desire to move on from notions of identity and acknowledges the difficulty of that search. It is this space of uncertainty that the concept of"post-identity" wants to capture, acknowledging a certain irritation with the inadequacy of identity, while celebrating the provisional liberation that is embedded in that affix,"post". Terms like post-black, post-race, post-ethnicity and post-identity are symptomatic of a cultural impasse that targets identity as the main culprit.70These are diagnostic terms that, admittedly, bring no ready cure. More than anything else, the affix "post" signals a disjuncture with the world in which we live and describes an intellectual mindset impatient to articulate alternative ways.

3 Art in a Post-identitarian World: Towards an 'Adversarial Aesthetics' Reading Personal Affects in terms of post-identity may mean that the show will not conform to expectations.Although the exhibition emerges out of democratic South Africa, many of these artworks want to be liberated from that context: they refuse to announce their identity or to be forever locked into the circuits that expect a certain look or a certain conceptual framework of art from South Africa. Indeed, one could argue that many of the artworks on this show actively engage the failure of identity. To overcome this "neurosis of identity",as Gerardo Mosquera once described it,2I many artists have targeted the body as a site of contestation. For it is on the body more often than not that identity seems to converge. As pointed out before, often the visible part of identity, such as race, is taken to stand for the whole,thus establishing a hierarchy of identity that is necessarily misleading. In response I want to appropriate Seshadri-Crooks' notion of an adversarial aesthetics here to describe some of the works on this show that aim to disrupt identity — racial, ethnic,gendered — through a sustained reference to the body and the self. Take the work of Churchill Madikida. In a series of photographic video stills entitled Struggles of the Heart, we are confronted with a close-up of the artist's face, painted white as is the custom in Xhosa initiation rituals that are a recurrent focus of Madikida's work. He is stuffing pap (a stiff porridge) into his mouth,a staple food of especially South Africa's black population. In the video on which these photographs are based, the act of engorging becomes one of regurgitation when the porridge starts to spill from his mouth. Filled to the brim, it seems, he starts retching it up. It's an unsettling experience watching the face fighting the white substance down and losing the battle over and again. While Madikida is clear about the importance of initiation rituals for the stability of traditional communities, he is nevertheless sceptical of disregard for the initiates in an age-old ritual intended to make men out of boys. Stories abound in the news of initiates suffering or even dying from exposure or botched circumcisions, a taboo of silence broken to protect the initiates but compromising the very sanctity and privacy that changes this act into a rite of belonging and acceptance. Likewise, in his work, Madikida betrays this privacy by speaking out, and we are the witnesses to the struggle that this condemnation of ritual engenders. In Blood on My Hands, a digitally manipulated video projection, we see two hands trying to wash off a red substance, the repetitive ritual set to a female voice singing a single phrase. Suddenly the image is manipulated so that the hands morph and mutate into grotesque Rorschach images that suggest the unregulated, undisciplined body — oozing, alien and explicitly sexual.The very act of cleansing spawns intimations of trauma and excess; once again the supposed sanctity of ritual is questioned and compromised,a desecration that is as incriminating as it is liberating. In both works,the body becomes the vehicle through which Madikida evaluates tradition and his own complicity in its careless perpetuation. He enunciates an ambivalent relation to heritage, tradition, ethnicity, belonging: a courageous act of betrayal that at once distances him from empty identity claims while searching for new articulations. This, then, is an adversarial aesthetics: Madikida is forcing us literally to see him differently, to realise the way in which his identity is at once in contradiction and in accordance with his upbringing.The body that spills over, in excess of itself, might be one way to describe these works of Madikida's, or, put differently, the failing of identity. Samson Mudzunga similarly tries to liberate himself from the shackles of tradition while finding new ways to celebrate it. Using the objects that he has carved for Personal Affects, Mudzunga stages a performance during which he is liberated from the carved wooden lock and chain that symbolically bind him, he then disappears into a giant wooden drum,only to reappear, minutes later, changed in appearance. COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

CHURCHILL MADIKIDA BLOOD ON MY HANDS (DETAIL) DIGITAL PRINT DIMENSIONS VARIABLE 2004 SAMSON MUDZUNGA SUKA AFRIKA FUNDUDZI DETAIL OF WOODEN LOCK AND CHAIN 2004

Mudzunga calls the performance and related objects Suka Afrika! (loosely translated as Shake up Africa!), a thematic continuation with performances that similarly explored his ambiguous relationship with the traditions and rituals that govern his life and shaped his identity.22 What may be described as the frustrating yet liberating insufficiency of identity in Mudzunga's and Madikida's work is articulated differently but equally powerfully in the work of performance artist Steven Cohen, who is represented on this show by a screening of his performance Chandelier, as well as by an installation of a personal boudoir in the Museum for African Art. On the opening night of Personal Affects, Cohen will reperform an adapted version of Chandelier, a public intervention that originally took place in Newtown, Johannesburg, in 2002,at a site where squatters had constructed an informal settlement under the highway bridges. Cohen's visit to Newtown coincided, unintentionally, with the arrival of bulldozers and so-called red ants, men dressed in red overalls paid by the municipal government to demolish these shacks.Amid the desperation and poverty of people about to lose their only homes, Cohen struts about, incongruously, in high fetish heels, dressed in a corset, bandaged penis and illuminated chandelier with a Star of David and other markings painted on his face. Subsequent projections of Chandelier have received predictably negative criticism. For European audiences, the audacity of a white man staging an indulgent art performance in a desperate situation seemed too much.They reduced the complex performance to a racist and insensitive appropriation of suffering for the benefit of art-making. But Chandelier could be read more productively as a statement of displacement and incongruousness. Literally embodying fragility and vulnerability by dressing in a chandelier, Cohen approximates the experience of loss and impotence of the shack dwellers but also, one suspects, of the red ants paid to carry out this hateful task. It is tempting and perhaps not incorrect to read Chandelier also as a meditation on the diminishing norm of whiteness in post-apartheid South Africa. But, as in Cohen's other provocative works, Chandelier scrambles codes of Jewishness, queerness, whiteness and masculinity into a powerful statement about incompatible and contradictory identities. Moving between these different poles of his subjectivity and playing them off each other, Cohen is confronted again and again with his own repeated displacement from the communities of sameness meant to harbour him.23

STEVEN COHEN CHANDELIER PERFORMANCE IN SHACK SETTLEMENT, NEWTOWN, JOHANNESBURG PHOTO: FIONA MCPHERSON 2002 THANDO MAMA 1994 (DETAIL) STILL FROM VIDEO DURATION 1 MIN 50 SEC 2004

Displacement,figured on the body, is also an ongoing concern in the work of Minnette Vari. In The Calling we see the artist/protagonist moving across rooftops, her profile etched against a dark and nebulous cityscape below. It is the city that she has called home for the last few years:Johannesburg,Jozi, Egoli, the city of gold which, in recent years, has become a more tangibly ambivalent space where the energy of liberation mixes with the threat of crime and dereliction. For this piece Vani physically went to film the inner city in the early morning, encountering a no-man's land of unlawful occupants and illegal immigrants. They exist in the cracks of rules and regulations, and in a strange and unexpected way Vail — a legal citizen — found that she shares their sense of dislocation in this new land.A white person in downtown Johannesburg is a rare sight but her disorientation stems from more than just geography, locality or identity. In images of Johannesburg juxtaposed with historical material and shots from Brussels and New York, the work becomes a statement about estrangement, an intimate and common enough experience.The work becomes a visit to all cities, or perhaps to no city, a treatise on the unhomely spaces generated by these utopian formations. On the one hand The Calling is quite removed from a specifically South African context, with Van i sitting atop the city like something out of a Wim Wenders movie, a gargoyle keeping watch; on the other it is also a work during which Vani actively engaged her environment: rather than digitally inserting herself into news events as in previous works,this piece required her to stage a hazardous physical engagement with a darkly alluring metropolis which she — with a certain irony — calls home. The Calling reveals the exclusion at the 11 I I I

heart of inclusion, the unhomely inside home. By recognising her own dislocation in the dislocation of others, her work transcends racial and social identities to speak about our endless searches for utopia and the uncanny, uncomfortable truths that we learn in the process. For Madikida, Mudzunga, Cohen,Vari and others such as Thando Mama and Diane Victor, it is the body, that most personal of artefacts, that has the potential to disturb our notions of identity. In works that refuse to respect the boundaries that cultural readings impose on the body, these artists disrupt identity to revel in difference, instability and incoherence. Indeed, as Paul Gilroy reminds us,"the desire to fix identity in the body is inevitably frustrated by the body's refusal to disclose the required signs of absolute incompatibility people imagine to be located there".24 This refusal of the body to conform to expectations, or, rather, its tendency to be in excess of expectations, is communicated particularly well through the mode of performance. Performance and specifically body art offer a way to particularize the subject"by exaggeratedly performing the sexual,gender, ethnic, or other particularities of this body/self", as Amelia Jones has argued.25 Not only does this strategy succeed in decentring the myth of the disinterested subject that centuries of Cartesian philosophy have upheld, but it is also a way to escape the suffocating hold of collective identities. By foregrounding the personal, the intimate and the particular in performances of the body,subjectivity is necessarily complicated and particularized, as we have seen in the work of Cohen, Mudzunga and Madikida. It is no surprise, then, to find so many works dealing with performance in this show,as performance clearly offers a powerful way to negotiate subjectivities and to distance the self from the constraints of identity. Performance is understood here not necessarily in the strictest sense of the word, but as art practices that foreground the active body, whether recorded or mediated. In addition many of the artists included in Personal Affects have chosen to focus on ritual in their work,a mode of performance directed at change and transformation.Transitions are often marked by rituals — the moment of birth, of manhood,of death — and it is possible therefore to read rituals as liminal moments invoking transformation and transportation. Rituals inspire but also enable us to change — whether permanently, temporarily or recurrently.They are then performances of subjectivity in change and in flux, in process and under construction. In Vapour Berni Searle takes as her point of departure a striking photograph on the front page of a Cape Town newspaper that showed 107 pots of food,cooking over open fires, as part of a feeding project during the Muslim festival of Eid. Initially Searle was simply struck by the sheer visual spectacle of this massive operation, but the attendant issues of community and outreach, of tradition and inheritance that are raised by this annual ritual also provided fertile ground to explore the kind of questions that are often a focus in Searle's work.Themes of cooking and foodstuffs feature often in her work, balancing a reference to family and continuity with an invocation of the female realm. For Vapour, Searle decided to re-stage the event,filling massive pots not with food but with water. In low camera angles we see close-ups of the fires and the pots, the human presence almost secondary to this, suggested only by bare feet or, in the video, dark silhouettes moving through the rows of roaring fires. Mostly it is a composition of light and dark,a striking chiaroscuro landscape that emphasizes the vulnerability of humans in the blaze.The fire, the water that cooks and vaporizes, lifting the huge lids, instantiate change and transformation: towards the end of the video we are left with an aerial view of a smouldering field, an apocalyptic landscape. Choosing to cook water rather than food, this work is ritual commenting on the act of ritual: no one will be fed; rather, change and transition stand central.As in so many of her other works,Searle foregrounds identity in transition, here subjected to catharsis. Ritual is also invoked by Wim Botha's Pieta, which, at first glance, appears to foreground prayer and adoration in the context of a Cathedral. But Botha reinterprets the Pieta by re-materialising Michelangelo's I

MINNETTE VARI THE CALLING DETAIL OF STILL FROM TWO-CHANNEL VIDEO 2003 BERNI SEARLE HEAT I DETAIL OF HAND-PRINTED COLOUR PHOTOGRAPH 132 X 121 CM 2004

famous marble work,subversively, in maize meal, a cheap staple food of many famished African countries. The meanings of loss, mourning and compassion that the original sculpture evokes are appropriated here into a vocabulary of need. By reversing this image,the work becomes a powerful mirror of Western complacency and complicity. Of course the work is also a powerful comment on a long tradition of Western art and the regulation of that canon. In recreating this icon of Western art in a local material, and reversing it for the southern hemisphere, Botha provides something like a counterargument by forcing us to see it in a new way. Botha's Pieta is at once familiar and strange, exacting a powerful shift in our perception, an adversarial aesthetics that forces viewers to reassess their position in relation to that piece and what it invokes. Claudette Schreuders similarly foregrounds adoration, but localised through a quasi Mami Wata/Mary figure. In both cases the crafting of these objects stands central, a painstaking process that bespeaks dedication and a repetitive, meticulous skill that translates as it represents. It is this repetition of skill that in the work of Doreen Southwood becomes a ritual in itself: in works that draw on traditionally feminine crafts such as needlework and embroidery, Southwood speaks intimately about her precarious presence in the world. The repetition involved in needlework becomes,for Southwood,a refuge, a contemplative ritual that provides stability, even if that is recognised as artificial and temporary.26 Southwood's work invokes memories of a girl's childhood,adorned with ribbons and bows, yet she insistently contradicts that presumed innocence. Quite simply, Southwood's works are never what they seem: pillars, structural elements of support, are made out of ribbons, and Black Hole simulates dark, threatening intensity with seductive satin ribbons. In the accompanying figurative work a pubescent girl, resembling Southwood, balances on a diving board.The delicate modelling is punctured dramatically by a hole in her back, an inevitable destiny of failure inscribed on her body. Likewise a glass figure bespeaks sheer fragility and delicacy, the already frail material blown to translucency at the vulnerable parts of the body such as the wrists. These are works that speak powerfully about personal anxieties and insecurities, an acknowledgement that situates the self within a space of fluctuation and wavering. In line with the notion of post-identity, this is an important insight that proclaims our dependency, our contingency and our complexity in this world.

CLAUDETTE SCHREUDERS THE FREE GIRL (DETAIL) JACARANDA WOOD. ENAMEL PAINT 123 CM HIGH WORK IN PROGRESS PHOTO: JOHN HODGKISS 2004 JANE ALEXANDER DETAIL OF WORKS IN PROGRESS. CAPE TOWN, JULY 2004

Mustafa Maluka's installation in the niche adjacent to the Poet's Corner in the Cathedral creates a space for the ritual of mourning and remembering. It is a memorial to Mr Devious, a Cape Town-based rapper recently murdered in the seemingly endemic Cape Flats gang violence. In glass vitrines, Maluka has placed a number of Devious' photographs and belongings, ordinary objects that become intimate testimonials to a man who was a community leader and an activist against social injustice, albeit on a small scale.We are presented with letters of condolence, photographs and video recordings of his performances and interviews by Dutch television crews. Maluka's choice to insert such extremely local content, a microcosm of Cape Flats politics, into this international arena is important: it is of course an act of recognition and accreditation, a way to claim and insist on the commemoration of a man marginalized by the mainstream South African media, despite the fact that he had a huge following in his own community and also in Europe, particularly in Amsterdam. But in the context of an art exhibition around the theme of Personal Affects, the installation is also abstracted to become something that talks about Maluka himself: like the portraits he has painted, these iconic figures are constitutive of Maluka's personal identity.They are memorials to aspects of his own life, validating the influences that combine to shape his subjectivity in an ongoing way: the role of community and upbringing, of shared language and values, and of the value of an "outside" perspective. Maluka, who has recently returned after six years in Amsterdam, is also talking about being removed from "home": now an insider with outside perspective, he is using that privilege to pay homage to urban heroes who are ironically voiceless beyond the boundaries of their own community. Like Devious, Maluka has found "foreign"

societies more open to his work than the South African cultural industry and has received local recognition for his art only after returning from his time abroad. This discrepancy between being on the inside and being on the outside â&#x20AC;&#x201D; local role models disregarded by the mainstream â&#x20AC;&#x201D; exemplifies, finally, not simply the shifting of identities, but the failure of identity that, in my opinion, stands central to this show. For it is through the figure of someone like Mr Devious that we recognize how limiting identity can be, how it is always so utterly incapable of capturing this ongoing process of definition.We are "dispersed, multiply identified, particularised" body/selves, as Amelia Jones has put it,22 a fact that makes us realise the fiction of subjecthood. Like the haunting misfits that populate Jane Alexander's photomontages and her sculpture landscapes, we are forlorn beings that thrive on community, yet acknowledge its insufficiency that always excludes aspects of ourselves.We are always contingent on others and therefore always changing, multi-faceted,fragmented and contradictory. 4 Good-bye Identity "Good-bye identity, welcome difference," writes Gerardo Mosquera, who continues:"Our labyrinths have confused or intoxicated us.We are now beginning to situate ourselves more within the fragment,juxtaposition and collage, accepting our diversity at the same time as our contradictions."28 These notions have powerful implications for the post-apartheid space out of which this show emerges.After ten years of democracy, we are impatient to move on and to revel in our radical differences and contradictions.These are the fraught spaces out of which we make art.These are the power and poetics of our lives.

I. See www.sondela.net/pages/ I /index.htm. 2. Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), p 97. 3. As the editors of Senses of Culture, Sarah Nuttall and Cheryl-Ann Michael, point out in their introduction, p I (Oxford University Press, 2000). 4. As Fuss writes,"questions of sameness and difference lie at the very heart of traditional metaphysical investigations into the problem of identity.To locate the identity of an object,for example, entails in analytic philosophy determining both whether that object is itself and not a different entity and whether that object remains the same over time". See Fuss, Essentially Speaking, p 102. 5. Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge MA:The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000), p 101. 6. Gilroy, Against Race, p 99. 7. Jorella Andrews, Introduction to Section on Identity, The Third Text Reader (London: Continuum, 2002), p 135. 8. This is also the point of departure of the reader Reclaiming Identity, edited by Paula ML Moya and Michael R Hames-Garcia (Berkeley University of California Press, 2000) that intends to "reevaluate","re-claim" and "rescue identity from the disrepute into which it has fallen" (p 2). 9. Directed by Cape Town artist Vuyile Voyiya and American art historian Julie McGee,the film presented interviews with, among others, IS primarily Cape Town-based black artists. See Art South Africa, 2(2), 2003, pp 32-41 for a discussion of the film and the controversy sparked by it. 10. Fuss, Essentially Speaking, p 116. 11.Ibid. I 2.Thelma Golden,"Post...", Introduction to the catalogue for Freestyle (The Studio Museum in Harlem. 2001), p 14. For Golden,the moment defined by "post-black" is simultaneously indebted to and a departure from the climate of multiculturalism that characterized cultural discourse in the United States in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Post-black retains the memory of the minority identity politics so integral to that multicultural moment, yet it denies their continued relevance. ' I

MUSTAFA MALUKA THE REALNESS MIXED MEDIA ON CANVAS 183 X 133 CM 2002

13. Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, Desiring Whiteness (London and New York: Routledge, 2000).Whiteness, in Seshadri-Crooks' argument, is not a physical or ideological property but"a master signifier (without a signified) that establishes a structure of relations, a signifying chain that through a process of inclusions and exclusions constitutes a pattern for organizing human difference" (pp 3-4). She uses Lacan's theory of sexual difference in an attempt to explain how and why racial identity persists as a system that organizes difference; what she calls "the peculiar resiliency of'race,' the subjective investment in racial differences, and the hypervalorization of appearance"(p 9). 14. I bid, p2. IS. Ibid, p 158. 16. Gilroy, Against Race, p 29. 17. David Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (HarperCollins, Basic Books, 1995), p 3. 18. Ibid, p 7. 19. As expressed by the title of Butler's influential Bodies that Matter (New York and London: Routledge, 1993). 20. A case in point would be the journal New Literary History that in 2000 devoted an entire volume to the issue of post-identity. 21. Gerardo Mosquera,"Good-Bye Identity,Welcome Difference. From Latin American Art to Art From Latin America" in Third Text 56,Autumn 2001,p 27. 22. See Anitra Nettleton,"Shaking up the Gallery..." in Art South Africa 2(2), 2003, pp 43-47. 23. Elsewhere I have appropriated Chantal Mouffe's concept of"contradictory interpellation"(1988,95) to conceive of the contradictory ways in which the self is experienced under certain conditions.See my"ImaginingAlternative White Masculinities: Steven Cohen's Living Art," forthcoming in The Performance of Race in South Africa, edited by Natasha Distiller and Melissa Steyn. See Chantal Mouffe,"Hegemony and New Political Subjects:Toward a New Concept of Democracy" in Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (London: Macmillan, 1988), pp 89-104. 24. Gilroy,Against Race, p 104. 25. Amelia Jones, Body Art /Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p 5. 26. We find some similarity with Roszika Parker's argument in her book The Subversive Stitch (1984) that posits a relation between needlework and the inculcation of femininity, in that needlework encourages female charms such as quietness, patience and service. 27. Jones, Body Art, pp 197-204. 28. Mosquera, Good-bye Identity, p 26.

THE ARTISTS Interviewed by Tracy Murinik

dig it all yummy Pigment print on cotton paper 45 X 40 CM 2004

JANE

ALEXANDER

A prayer for remission of sins PSALM 51 King James Version HAVE mercy upon me,0 God, in thy lovingkindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions. 2

Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.

For I acknowledge my transgressions: and my sin is ever before me.

Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight: that thou mightest be justified when thou speakest, and be clear when thou judgest. Behold, I was shapen in iniquity: and in sin did my mother conceive me.

Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts: and in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom.

Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

Make me to hear joy and gladness; that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice.

Hide thy face from my sins, and blot out all mine iniquities.

Create in me a clean heart,0 God; and renew a right spirit within me.

I I

Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy holy spirit from me.

Restore me the joy of thy salvation; and uphold me with thy free spirit.

Then will I teach transgressors your ways; and sinners shall be converted unto thee.

Deliver me from bloodguiltiness,0 God, thou God of my salvation: and my tongue shall sing aloud of thy righteousness.

0 Lord, open thou my lips; and my mouth shall shew forth thy praise.

For thou desirest not sacrifice; else would I give it: thou delightest not in burnt offering.

The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart,0 God, thou wilt not despise.

Do good in thy good pleasure unto Zion: build thou the walls of Jerusalem.

Then shalt thou be pleased with the sacrifices of righteousness, with burnt offering and whole burnt offering: then shall they offer bullocks upon thine altar.

lamb with stolen boots (detail) Reinforced plaster, oil paint and mixed media WORK IN PROGRESS 2002-4

Jane Alexander Reference is made to blood primarily as a conduit of genetic inheritance, but also its capacity to support, convey and clear contagious viruses, oxygen (also the network and processing system), colour etc. as well as, inter alia, the various circumstances of extensive spillage on the continent and the relationship of all these aspects to blood in a historical and genetic context. I do not think the work is about blood but there is a thread that refers to blood that seems to run through all of the work.

boots (2002-4), a "scarecrow figure with optional dress", a gentle lamb face on a young girl's body, golden thorns above her head, with stick scarecrow arms â&#x20AC;&#x201D; crucifix-like in her stance â&#x20AC;&#x201D; wears red rubber gloves, dark blue rubber boots and a small (optional) white cotton dress.There's also Guardian (2002-4), a tall monkey figure in grey felt, with glassy blue-grey eyes, who wears black boots, and a jackal's tail tied with ribbon around his waist; Small beast (2003), a small, slightly demonic-looking four-legged animal; and Bird (2004), an eerie figure, with a vulture-like head and legs and a humanoid back, devoid of either wings or arms, with bloodied-looking bird-like feet.

Jane Alexander has proposed to install nine new figures in the Cathedral of St John the Divine, in the All Souls altar enclosure to the right of the nave. The disquieting words of Psalm 5I:"A prayer for remission of sins", will play around them in the form of Gregorio Allegri's haunting choral arrangement, Miserere Mel (ca I638).The floor space may be covered with industrial strength red rubber gloves and littered with pangas and sickles.These seem to offer evocative clues to unraveling this work, which is titled The sacrifices of God are a troubled spirit, a slightly but significantly altered extract from verse 17 of Psalm 5I:"The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit".The tone that is set might at first appear bleak, but is perhaps less severe than its original: Alexander describes that "it is a response, as in a 'replym, the shift reading almost as an alternative diagnosis, or a second opinion; a sense of humanity that is conflicted rather than already annihilated.

Psalm 51 proposes the rather chilling notion of "bloodguiltiness": the idea that all beings are "shapen in iniquity" and conceived in sin by the mother â&#x20AC;&#x201D; a type of original sin conveyed through ages, through blood links.They will not find deliverance until the "walls of Jerusalem" are built: a change of world order that is required for existence to take on true meaning.This prayer for the "remission of sins" is an ambivalent prospect:"remission" might indeed imply a complete absolution, a plea for pardon, but might also imply instead a lessening in severity of symptoms or a temporary state of relief.

Within this group is Harbinger with protective boots (2004), a tall, slender figure, with a humanoid body and an antelope face; clear, strongly focused eyes that look out from beneath an applied (disguise) gemsbok muzzle and horns (one horn straight and piercing with a red flag at its end, the other horn twisted back on itself, having never developed fully), holding a walking stick in each hand and wearing resilient black rubber boots, seemingly looking far in front of himself, like a type of seer. Hobbled ruminant with rider (2003/4) is a pale, hoofed animal with bound hind legs and closed eyes, who carries a small, rather patched and battered leather monkey on its back. Bat eared doll riding a bat eared fox wearing a black backed jackal skin (2004) is a "small figure in grey felt on stuffed animal". Lamb with thorns and stolen

The "thread of blood" that runs through Alexander's work takes various forms, not necessarily to evoke a sense of morbidity, but for all of its significances. In the work for the Cathedral, that thread extends itself visually, creating a certain sense of connection: the red rubber gloves that cover the floor, the red gloves worn by Lamb with thorns and stolen boots and the red soles of her boots, the red hands of Bat eared doll and Guardian, Harbinger's red flag, Bird's bloodied-looking feet, pangas, sickles ... Each of these figures will likely, at some stage,find itself within a future work,apart or in combinations with other characters, or inserted into a photomontage.Although fellow congregants in this instance,they are not a fixed unit that infers a fixed significance or meaning.As such,Alexander's selection of these nine figures constitutes a very particular grouping that is necessarily site-specific.

Artist's acknowledgements: Ridoeh Allen,John Nankin, Abraham Theron. COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

bird and lamb with stolen boots Reinforced plaster, oil paint and mixed media WORKS IN PROGRESS 2002-4

(facing page)

harbinger with protective boots with bird and lamb with stolen boots Reinforced plaster, oil paint and mixed media WORKS IN PROGRESS

2002-4

(this page) WORKS IN PROGRESS THE ARTIST'S STUDIO. CAPE TOWN, JULY 2004

(overleaf)

guardian (detail) Synthetic clay, oil paint, felt, jackal tail WORK IN PROGRESS

2002-4

:1"

mieliepap pieta Digital simulation of work in the Cathedral of St John the Divine 2004

WIM

BOTHA

Tracy Murinik The word "simulation" is central to discussions of your work. In relation to the Mieliepap Pieta (or Maize Meal Pieta), there is the reference to Michelangelo's Pieta, and the replacement of the marble of the original with maize meal. Firstly, the reference to the Pieta, which as visual and ideological symbol refers to religion, but is also about solace, mourning ... it's a symbol of some kind of humanity. Wim Botha Of sorrow and loss. The Italian word also implies solace, so that, beyond its art historical status, the work becomes an icon of comfort. It also involves an acceptance of events as inevitable — it's the inevitability of martyrdom, which goes hand in hand with ideology.Wherever there is an ideology there will be martyrs, if you believe strongly enough.You mourn the events, and you mourn the sacrifice, but it becomes a justification in itself of the cause. But that inevitability has to be rationalized within a particular religious or moral framework. Sure, whichever is the current framework of the day. The Pieta, images of Hector Petersen being carried in the Soweto uprising of 1976, and any number of other scenes of mourning — of people with a wounded or dead person on their laps — these images are all over, in every second newspaper. Except, at that moment the image reflects a profound loss, a profound sadness, usually because it shows a victim of some sort of injustice or anger.Whereas the Pieta itself has almost sublimated that experience — the loss and the anger and the confusion, these are combined with acceptance — it's justified "for a cause", which is a very strange idea. Under what circumstances will a son's sacrifice ever be justifiable? It's difficult to get your head around. But these are things that I think I leave to viewers — my main interest is in the Pieta as an artwork, as a significant development in art history.The main motivation in swapping the one material for another is on the level of its nature as an artwork — it's not

about ideology primarily. So you take an icon of Western art, something that's really well known, is almost unchallenged in the value that's ascribed to it — for various reasons, and if you've seen it you'll know why.The spin-offs from this work,and others that are indisputably powerful,function very much like ideology — a very clear, very distinctive, possibly viable idea which people start believing in and eventually pervert into something that's non-viable, dangerous. In a similar way works like the Pieta have spawned so many variations, have had such an influence on subsequent production, that this perpetuates the idea of those works as being "real art". Which is interesting: how do you copy that? How do you simulate it in a way that assimilates all of those aspects? And,as a young white Afrikaans artist in South Africa, things like that were held up for all time as close to an ideal. It becomes an ideology in itself: the ideology of"good art". A translation into image of an ideological concept ... Well sure, a whole lot of ideological concepts. It's one image that carries ideology with it, similar to icons. Previous work I did with icons was based on having a flash recognition of an object that you've got resolved preconceived ideas about.You see a crucifix and it has a very specific meaning to you personally, based on things you've sorted out over the course of your life.This is like that, except it's an autonomous artwork. It's still based on a religious event, but it's no longer a generic manifestation of a story. It is a very specific artwork. I don't think I know the full implications of that shift yet ... There are so many obvious things about the work, like substituting the material itself. Marble is very difficult to work with; it's very expensive — it's reserved for religious or elite applications. Really its only viable purpose is one of decoration. It's a substance used for beautifying: absolutely pure, it's amazingly beautiful and it's durable. From my point of view in South Africa, substituting it with maize meal — it's a staple diet, similar to religion. It is very inexpensive, but is valuable to the point that it makes the marble seem redundant, or trivial. So between those two,a lot of interesting things start to develop, which I'm not driven to explore all of myself. I think it leads off into separate things. 11 I

WIM BOTHA IN NEW YORK. FEBRUARY 2004

69 mieliepap pieta Work in progress: reference material and armature ARTIST'S STUDIO, JOHANNESBURG

2004

The Pieta is such a specific symbol: a symbol of a type of humility that intuits an understanding of loss, and there's humanity in the solace it provides. What does that symbol become when it's made in a substance, like maize meal, which has the capacity to be physically nurturing, sustaining? That's not entirely accurate because in using the maize meal I destroy its value. I return it to an absolutely useless, decorative item, which might have specific meaning for specific people, like the original. This is where I understand the irony to exist because yes, one tries to translate what the meaning of that substance is, but at the very same time that you realize what this is, that meaning is lost because it's not useable â&#x20AC;&#x201D; nobody is able to be sustained by it. So the idea of solace immediately falls away. To me the symbol is undermined. It sublimates again. It doesn't necessarily undermine it; it also enforces it, by having it be granted a certain value or name. By doing this as a contemporary artwork you reinforce its supposedly timeless value. It's almost like running a virus into something â&#x20AC;&#x201D; it continues to function the way it should. It has a slight alteration which might steer it in different directions, but it very much remains an example of what"good art" is, what it should be; what sacrifice is, what it should be; what the implied ideology is and what it should be.So it remains all of those things, but slightly altered. In a way it ridicules the original notion, it's a subversion of the original without changing its inherent nature. If a lot of those original elements are sustained as well as having a different focus brought to them, where does this position you,the artist, in relation to the sculpture? To a large degree I'm absent in this. I intervene and disappear again. If the illusion is successful then I disappear again. It's almost like a parallel universe: one thing exists, it has a lifespan, and at some point somebody intervenes and it splits and it has two alien lives. So there will no longer be just the one

original Pieta, there will be another, made 500 years later in a different world and a different place with entirely different intentions. Should the original Pieta be destroyed for some reason, mine will also renew its reason for existence.There are two of these things in different places of the world, but the second one is a copy, it's not in any way trying to supplant or replace; it's very conscious of the fact that it is only a copy, with a very reduced podium, but ideologically or in its implications it might aspire to gain the same kind of value ascribed to the original.The Maize Meal Pieta in South Africa might mean as much to people as the marble one would mean to religious people in Rome. I'm not sure yet. That's an interesting point, the idea of some kind of parallel reality ... The point at which people pick up on a simulation is the point at which the work makes sense, and it's also the pivotal point at which every concept that people imagine is related to that work fractures. But it needs to be recognized. Going back to my question of where you exist in relation to the work, I'd suggest that you become the pivotal eye: you redirect the possibilities of how something is seen, and anybody who doesn't pick up on that is going to walk away from the work simply believing that they recognize it. Which is I think what happens in relation to the symbols that you subvert: on one level this relies on a type of arrogance in the viewer that you understand what you're seeing, and at the point that that falters, you step into the trap of being duped every time you fail to read an image critically. In a way that's very accurate because the idea of the crucifix [commune:suspension of disbelief, a large crucifix carved out of bibles] initially was all of those things. But the core thing was that it is absolutely recognizable, and has specific meanings, but diverse meanings, to diverse people, presented in an altered state. It doesn't necessarily attract or destroy the import of religion ... COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

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2003

You made the point about the Pieta not supplanting the original: so what one originally understands it to mean still holds, but the way in which one remembers this becomes a point of conscious awareness. You see it, you recognize it — you see that image so many times, in reproductions,fakes, curios, but hopefully never again will you look at one of those things without questioning it a little further than you would have before. For the Museum you've proposed a work similar to commune: onomatopoeia: an installation which presents "a 'room' defined by its decorations and fixtures, omitting the walls, ceiling and floor of the room". There's a pun on "suspended reality" — quite literally — but the thrust of the work is that it does all of the things we've spoken about: you're unnerved by it, unsettled at the point that you understand that it's not a room — it's perhaps the simulation of a room, but which is dependent on your recognition of what constitutes a room; and it's only made up of the ideological semblances of what you imagine that room to represent ...

And we're back to ideology again. Based on belief systems, things take a certain shape.The shape of that belief system is intertwined, so altering things within that structure has profound effects.Again it's a bit like inserting a virus — not necessarily a malignant one, but one which gradually alters the nature — in the consciousness of the viewer.The works insist that you view things in a slightly different way.They're all based on South Africa, on things that happened recently, or that are happening or will happen. Ironically suspension of disbelief has become meaningful to many people, and that's part of what I wanted to play with. It's the epitome of a contemporary religious work; to some it's sacrilegious and unacceptable. It will be very interesting to see how that develops: how the subverter becomes subverted by its own methods ... For me suspicion is a major part of it: adding to something that's unquestioned in order to get you to reconsider. It's very valuable because people don't reconsider, they don't revisit firmly held beliefs, except when forced to by extreme circumstances, as in South Africa.

Well, saying that it's a simulation of a room is not really accurate — it becomes a simulation of the ideology of the space, you have merely suggested the existence of an enclosed space by these elements. Spaces are determined by their function, by what you see.These objects are specific: they're the kind of things that you get in specific kinds of places. So the same thing that I intend to happen to viewers with the Pieta is intended with this.When I showed onomatopoeia before, there were such amazing responses. Some people were overwhelmed by nostalgia,and one woman ran out of the room waving her hands,shouting"No, no, no ..." Possibly for her it really altered the way that she saw things. It defies a sense of grounding — we rely on what we see as being real, and the point at which it becomes illusory...

mnemonic reconstruction Preparatory drawing

2004

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STEVEN COHEN EN ROUTE TO THE MUSEUM FOR AFRICAN ART, FEBRUARY 2004

STEVEN

COHEN

Tracy Murinik To start with a recollection: during our trip to New York in February, we were invited to a cocktail party at the Museum for African Art. We left from the hotel to catch the subway: you with your face painted white, wearing only a very frail white cotton frock, no tights, no shoes. Temperatures outside were sub-zero. Walking a short distance behind you and Jay Pather, I heard Jay asking you,"How far can you push the compromise?" And this stayed with me as a fundamental question around your work. Because your work often seems uncompromising. You test and push some excruciating boundaries: prejudice, injustice, hypocrisy, boundaries that are physical, social ... It seems the major compromise is always potentially that of your own safety. Steven Cohen For me the question is,'How far can you push without compromise? Where's my compromise? Where's somebody else's?" For me it's a question of my compromise: how uncomfortable will I be? What danger will I face? It's a very personal question. I'll do anything that's not permanently injurious to myself, or temporarily injurious to somebody else, because I don't believe what I do ever causes injury. I'll work anywhere under that level. Is it more difficult to push those boundaries for other people than yourself? I think it's similar. I'm the same as other people. I'm normal, I'm not some freak who gets off on whatever ...That's why the charge against me in Lyon of "sexual exhibitionism" was so incorrect, because it's not about pleasure, it's about conviction in the result. [Cohen was arrested while performing a "lament dance" at what was formerly Gestapo headquarters but is now the Jewish Museum of Resistance and Deportation in Lyon. He was wearing high heels and stockings, a Canadian ice hockey uniform with shoulder pads worn upside down as a tutu, an authentic yellow star from the Holocaust, a huge white Star of David on his head, a magnifying glass attached to his penis to show his circumcision, and holding an exact replica of a human pelvis and spine as part of his lament of dancing for the dead.] In

that intervention I knew that if I didn't wear the magnifying glass over my dick it wouldn't be as troublesome for people.And I wondered if I should leave it off, if I should simplify the work, reach more people ... So for me it's about a compromise with myself:"Can I do that?" In the end I couldn't. I knew there'd be trouble with the law â&#x20AC;&#x201D; I knew that it was illegal. It's in relation to,"How can I make the work?" that I question compromise. I know that I'm not working at the level of violent action; I know that it's at the level of art.And art has to be potent to actually injure people, you know.When it comes to injuring my body, I don't do that. I won't break my arm out of interest for art, because I have to use my body for a long time.And I try to give it something in return, because I ask a lot of it, like you saw: how to make walking to a museum rather difficult ... Because it's always a very simple thing: being barefoot in the cold is simple; being jeered at and laughed at by people who pass is simple, you know; walking is simple. Is it simple? No ... You can make it not simple, by twisting elements of it. I don't believe in piercing myself, I don't believe in that level of making work. I think you should do normal things with your body that are difficult. Because people walk barefoot in freezing cold, and that's some people's life. It's not bizarre, it's not indulgent. It references something real.Always the worst things are the real things in the work.And that wasn't even a performance â&#x20AC;&#x201D; it was about how to get through space in a big foreign city ... Sometimes the most interesting things are around the work:the coming and going and all that is equally the work. It's just not treated like the work, it's not recorded and presented. But those interactions and that real way of being in the world are the same as the work. In a way, Chandelier, the work you will present at the Cathedral of St John the Divine, is the ultimate echo of that. You've described it as a "public intervention by the artist as a living chandelier" that took place in an informal settlement in Johannesburg that was about to be razed. You've said that your arrival at the same time as the "red ants"(red overall-clad lOPYRIGHT PROTECTF'

STEVEN COHEN AT THE CATHEDRAL OF ST JOHN THE DIVINE, FEBRUARY 2004

chandelier Performance in shack settlement, Newtown, Johannesburg PHOTO: JOHN HOGG

2002

private security employees associated with forced evictions) was incidental, and that prior to that you had built up a relationship with the community over time. You also mention that the work took you one year to complete. Can you describe how it came about, and what it feels like to go ahead with a performance of being a beautiful light and living commentary in the face of people's homes being destroyed around you? It's such a profound experience, it's hard to recap it quickly. In a sense, as an artist, and having made art from a position of no money and no support a lot of the time, I felt able to look people in the eye and know what hardship is, and know what discrimination is. But on another level I really felt like the rich, white person who's had another life. I had difficulty with wondering if I was the monster I was representing. It was weird to be in a performance â&#x20AC;&#x201D; only, it's not a performance, you see, because sometimes in performance you have to focus on the "now",on the action, without thinking.And sometimes in the work I do,thinking comes, because it goes on for hours ... It's not theatrical, I'm not someone else. It was a difficult work to make because it didn't feel "kosher". But that, I think, is the power of it. And I felt like I didn't have to do much; that being there was telling a story:"digitally painting the story", I've said.Which is what other people did, but I make the image,somehow,and the people around me really make the meaning of the image. It's such a collaborative thing. It's like when the police come and handcuff you, it's collaborative.And people don't do that on stages, in theatres, in galleries quickly. They don't really interact with work. I had no idea that the red ants were going to be razing the settlement; the people who lived there had no idea. They don't come a week before or two weeks before to warn you.And I think that sometimes when you decide to do something,the universe conspires to help you, and it's full of those kinds of moments for me. I wrote about being "aside myself","outside myself": observing myself, almost like the people laughing at me at the rugby [referring to a performance at Loftus Versveld sports stadium in Pretoria].And that's almost a kabbalistic state of exultation, of being outside and beside yourself. It's strange.And that was particularly strange because

it was so long,so persistent â&#x20AC;&#x201D; I wanted the whole picture,from houses to no houses, and the people moving away. I wanted the whole story. It wasn't an hour's performance, it wasn't a photo-shoot; it was like being there through the whole process. Afterwards I felt more changed than from other works ... Because we don't usually witness that, and if you do, people see it out their window driving past, they don't really get to "be there". It's amazing what it felt like to see that happen.And on the other hand, it had its own tragic beauty of being real, not being for the camera. Sometimes the camera is incidental, in real, powerful life, like in wars: no one really cares about the camera when you're losing your leg or your house. People often ask about the ethics of the making,and stuff like that ... I can only make my own decisions as an artist, and be responsible for those.And if they're different from yours, we talk about it.The more intelligent and the more advanced people are, the more those things are a concern for them.Whereas real life is different from the labels academics give it. It's the kind of stuff shopkeepers understand, but academics talk about for a long time to come to understand. You've mentioned that Chandelier, rather than your previous performance works, has opened doors for you outside South Africa. You've said that,"The rest is too inside South Africa, too complicated, too regional and probably too excessive." What challenges have you experienced in making your work in France, where you're currently living, and other places overseas? What are those differences? Everything's different ... everything's the same, in a different way, because it's another culture, another language, another operating technique of the police, or of the public, or of the way you're allowed to express issues about your identity. I found that in Europe it's strange to think of yourself as "white". They have the luxury of not seeing themselves as a race, almost. I never take it for granted that being white is not an issue.

chandelier Performance in shack settlement, Newtown, Johannesburg PHOTO: FIONA MCPHERSON

2002

STEVEN COHEN EN ROUTE TO AND OUTSIDE THE MUSEUM FOR AFRICAN ART, FEBRUARY 2004

What do they see themselves as? French? Human,something philosophical, bigger than French ... I don't know how to explain. I'm tired of explaining Chandelier. It's such a strange, delicate work, I really wish I could share it with people on a level that they were there, seeing something so surreal and strange and horrible and beautiful and brutally sensitive, and maybe laughable.And people there say, "Why are you doing that?" But we fought for the right to make that work,We fobbed off the sheriff of the court by refusing to leave â&#x20AC;&#x201D; you know it's not like people were happy to see us. People were persistently telling us to go; but that was only the people that wanted us to go, whereas in the video you also have a woman saying it was enlightening for her. So that's why it's important not to respond to the demands of a minority when in that situation. Funny how it can be really more threatening to some people than to others. I don't know how much I have to defend the work, because it's for other people to discuss between themselves.And that always works in Europe: people discuss those things among themselves, outside of the maker ... it becomes a thing in the audience, and that's always good.That's a relief to me because then, really, the work is being done,Whereas in South Africa we don't know how to talk amongst ourselves in an audience. Chandelier was one part of a series of things I wanted to do with the chandelier.And in time I'll do them. But it took us so long to make it because it's expensive: the chandelier's expensive, the lighting's expensive ... It was really about constructing and saving and asking for help, small loans from people who made a small investment in it, and that's why it took a long time.And also getting to know where and how took a long time, walking around the area, looking ... Because I wanted it to be people who lived in the city who didn't have electricity or access to any of the privileges of the city: they don't shop, they don't spend,they don't shit in toilets, they don't do any of that. But they live there, you know, it's urban, hard core: this isn't some township out in the hills ... Some people overseas have misinterpreted it as my farm in Zimbabwe being invaded!

its implications shift quite consciously according to where you choose to show the work? It almost problematizes it for me, you know, because now it's all this stuff about Jesus and angels and church ... I wondered if it does actually problematize it, because visually I've always had the sense of the work being some kind of Illuminating marker, something that literally sheds light on issues, and I was curious about that in relation to "Steven in New York", as well as "Steven in a cathedral" ... It's not me,it's not a solo this time; it's also so much about South Africa, and people in South Africa, and life in South Africa â&#x20AC;&#x201D; it's like bringing a whole gang of squatters' reality to New York. I'm relieved it's not me dancing in a studio in a chandelier. I think it's appropriate for that to be in a church,At first I would think it might be good to be in a cathedral because there'd be no chandeliers, no excess ... But that cathedral has wonderful chandeliers, immense ones! But there's something about being alive that's a big advantage over any other chandelier. For the Museum you've proposed installing a "boudoir", which you describe as "an intimate, complex and multi-layered look at the worldview of the artist living and working in a South African context". And it would contain a range of physical objects, as well as a video component drawing on some of your previous performance works. I don't know now that I want to complicate everything with previous works ... For me it would make sense to make a boudoir installation about Chandelier, and to show Chandelier in other circumstances: projected over a dressing table, in the mirror,with the chandelier costume in the room and the pliers that made the chandelier,the personal stuff ... makeup on the table, chairs that I sit on â&#x20AC;&#x201D; to give people a sense of where the work came from.

What type of significance will the work take on being presented in New York, in a massive cathedral, because I expect that COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

STEVEN COHEN AT THE MUSEUM FOR AFRICAN ART, FEBRUARY 2004

struggles of the heart Digital prints DIMENSIONS VARIABLE

2003

CHURCHILL

MADIKIDA

Tracy Murinik Your work is often quite contentious in that it interrogates Xhosa traditional practice and culture at a number of levels. Can you tell me more about the themes and questions that drive your work?

But then these images started appearing in newspapers, on postcards ... I'd had some reservations about the photographs in the gallery space, but when they started coming out in newspapers and postcards and other places, I thought no, this is not okay. But for me he opened up a dialogue that I was able to participate in. Even though I'm saying what he did was wrong, what I imagine is that when privacy has been invaded and possibly misrepresented, when someone tries to right that representation, he or she is usually put on the spot to divulge more of his or her private life. In the sense of"No,this is not what happened.This is what really happens ..."

Churchill Madikida The main theme that I'm dealing with is the Xhosa tradition of circumcision. It is not that secret but it is sacred, because it encompasses the involvement and interaction of the whole community. Before you enter initiation, you first shout and announce your status:"I'm still a boy but I'm planning to go through this process and be a man." And most of my performances are based on this public exhibitionism â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the announcement that this is what I'm going to be doing. It is performance, for show; but it's also announcing what's happening in the community,and inviting the community to participate.The boy does this by shouting and telling the whole village what's going to happen. In my performances I talk about manhood in general, integrating that into the shouts and rants of this boy announcing his stuff. In a performance I did in a gallery in Johannesburg, I kept on saying,"I'm a man ..." and this and that. And this was spontaneous â&#x20AC;&#x201D; it's not something I'd planned.The action itself is based on what the initiates do. But what I say comes out as spontaneous.

You have to propose an alternative viewpoint. I've tried to find ways of doing that without divulging too much. I try to divulge, but with limited access. That access would be limited even within the traditional community that practises these traditions, apart from the people who are intimately engaged with that practice itself. In the Eastern Cape,for instance, it would only be men who are really exposed to whatever happens in the practice itself. But beyond that, some people are involved within the various levels of the community â&#x20AC;&#x201D; certain people will have access to what happens; some people assume that they know,and others do know.

I try to engage with the audience to some degree: I use English, I use Xhosa, I use initiates' language, which is so secret that only people who've been through initiation will understand what I am saying. But the audience is given access at different levels, and is also stopped from gaining access at different levels. So I'm playing in between the idea of secret and public and sacred, and all those kinds of things. What I usually say is that I deal with issues of privacy and the public.What influenced me was the controversy around Steve Hilton-Barber [a photographer who documented initiation ceremonies which took place on his family's farm, causing widespread debate when he exhibited them in a gallery in Johannesburg]. When I looked at the images that he shot, in the gallery. I was fine, because to me a gallery space is elevated. It's given a particular context. COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

lullaby for saluka Digital prints DIMENSIONS VARIABLE

2002

There's a hierarchy of knowledge and access?

there's an astonishing lexicon of imagery. There's a sense of spirituality and religion — flaming hearts and Christian imagery; there's also a sense of birthing, of things sexual, which could also be traumatic: the washing of the hands, that sense of culpability, almost Lady Macbeth-like. But at the same time, the hands work in unity — as an organic entity that transforms itself all the time. Can you tell me more about your intentions in this work?

That's right. And within that hierarchy, some men have, I imagine, given the information to their wives, to their kids, and to whoever else — because we're not all the same: I can keep a secret,some can't! So that secrecy has been tapped into, and people know what happens.And they especially know that some initiates run away to hospital,some die ... So there is a need to divulge what really happens there, in a sense of trying to curb deaths and all this stuff that's happening. So into my mad rantings, in my performances, I put all these questions. People in the city don't know that this is really what an initiate looks like — it looks like a theatrical performance, but it's not. People who understand — even if I had to dress up like that and walk around the township, they'd think I'm an initiate who's run away ... But when I'm doing these performances in Johannesburg or Cape Town,or in the United States, out of context — when I've taken this tradition and exposed it in these places where some people don't know the practice and don't understand it — I'm not really dealing with the tradition itself, I'm dealing with identity. I'm dealing with issues that have to do with culture and technology — technology not as in computers, but in the sense of civilization being advanced. People now are looking to undermine where they come from, and when they do that — I still believe that tradition is worthwhile — they're undermining my beliefs. So those are the traditions that I deal with in my performances.

My intentions when I started working with the concept of Blood on My Hands related to the fact that I was going to be presenting a commercial show. I believe that the reason why cultural or traditional practices are being demeaned, or why people are abusing those kinds of practices, is because of commercialism: it's all about money.These days "traditional healers" collect books on circumcision, and they know they'll be getting R100 or a bottle of whisky or whatever for them. It's all being commercialized rather than realizing the value that it had before: that it had to do with community,with individuals, with society. So now people have tended to uphold different approaches: some are going the traditional way, others are going the modern — that is, the hospital — way; and others, instead of singing old traditional songs, are now singing church songs. So it's all mixed up. And the church ministers know that within the tradition people come in and give gifts, there's money involved ... So all these people have become involved in this tradition.

The questions that you pose around culture and tradition are also quite contentious, because you don't take a one-dimensional approach to them: there's an acknowledgement of the value of the tradition, and an acceptance and ownership of those traditions as being sacred and part of your identity. But at the same time you raise questions around issues like safety. There's a simultaneous acceptance and rejection, as in the consumption and regurgitation of pap [stiff porridge] which happens in the work Struggles of the Heart that you'll be presenting at the Museum. In the work for the Cathedral, Skeletons in My Closet (also referred to as Blood on My Hands),

So I was sitting and thinking,"Am I not doing that — commercializing tradition through my work? I'll be selling some of my stills; I'll be selling, maybe,some movies." And that's really blood on my hands — skeletons in my closet.As an artist, you need to engage, but at what expense? And am I really prepared to deal with these skeletons? That's why there's that action of washing: a sense of recognizing and acknowledging what is happening, and I have to deal with these issues, and continue doing so throughout my life. So that's my very personal involvement in the movie. But Blood on My Hands also deals again with the practice, the tradition: it has to do with the community,the individual and society, and also with the outside world — people from the outside who are gazing at or consuming all this in these images.

CHURCHILL MADIKIDA OUTSIDE THE CATHEDRAL OF ST JOHN THE DIVINE. FEBRUARY 2004

blood on my hands Digital prints DIMENSIONS VARIABLE

2004

Because most of the time these kinds of images are looked at as being barbaric, but why would you consume something that offends you? So on the other hand they're fascinated. It's playing with those parameters as well. It took a lot of time to make this movie work, because in the beginning it was only these hands and the audio. I tried different effects until it is as it is now — it changes shape and is organic, and, as you pick up, it is traumatic and sensual, it's fascinating, it's beautiful ... It is exactly what I wanted it to be. Because what I'm dealing with is all that it means to be human. It has to do with being barbaric, it has to do with trauma, it has to do with being beautiful — in the sense that the value that is fixed to this [initiation] practice is supposed to uplift you to become a responsible individual in society. Does showing this work in the Cathedral space have a specific resonance for you, or is it simply a space that evokes questions around association and belief? That's a very interesting question actually, because it was in that space that the whole idea came to me, the idea of blood on my hands.When I was in the church, that church was really heavy; I'd never experienced anything like that before. I mean,there are buildings as high as anything in Johannesburg, but the way they are built, they are accommodating.This church is meant to intimidate: as a building it is meant to put fear into an individual — it's overwhelming. And religion: if I had to say I was a non-believer, that would be false. I do believe. I don't believe in the idea that you do good because you are promised something else — that is problematic to me. I want to think that you do good because you want to do good, not because you've been promised a reward.

of its own. It was a personal reflection on my philosophy and my engagement with my culture, my interrogation of culture as a part of my identity, because I feel that to question what we've been brought up to believe is supposed to be the ultimate condition that I live or abide by.What is it to be a man in Xhosa tradition? The conceptualization of that is that you're supposed to go to initiation and come back a responsible man. But there's nothing that ever says you should question your beliefs. I grew up with all these mixed identities — my mother is "coloured", my father is Sotho but died when I was very young; my stepfather is "coloured",and the township in which I grew up was Xhosa-dominated. I chose to become Xhosa because I believed in that sense of community, I believed that their way of life is right ... And now that I'm questioning that, there is this tendency for me to think,"If I was really Xhosa, would I be thinking this?" Some members of the community have said,"No,it's just growth of the character, that's why he spends all his energy questioning his beliefs, our beliefs." So I sort of isolate myself by doing this ... there is that boundary created.When you go to school and you learn and advance, it becomes so that you're isolated, especially when you go back home and try to speak with your peer group. My experience is that there is that gap between myself and them.And I guess they know it. They experience it.They're proud of what I'm doing, but still they ask at what cost.And then some people know that at the moment I'm untouchable, that I've progressed with my thoughts,that I can stand up for my beliefs — which I did by participating in those rituals, because I believed fully in them.

When I thought about the piece, I was thinking about the church, about missionaries, about colonialism; I was thinking about America,and especially its foreign policy. I was thinking about the involvement of America in South Africa during apartheid. I thought all these things about the United States. I also thought all these things about the church.And I thought about confessions — it seemed obvious in that space for me to take a step back and look at the skeletons in my closet,and then the action becomes a confession COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

cats drink champagne and toast death and pain... Mixed media on canvas 183 X 133 CM

2002

MUSTAFA

MALUKA

Tracy Murinik You describe your proposal for the Cathedral as being "another piece in which [you] attempt to memorialize persons or events [you]find important in your personal history" â&#x20AC;&#x201D; things that have contributed to who and what you are, your personal identity. The loss of Mr Devious was one such profound moment. Tell me about the work you'll be making, and a bit about Mr Devious and the circumstances under which he died. Mustafa Maluka I've been working with a friend on this website, www.africanhiphop.com, since 1996, but when I got to Amsterdam in 1998 I was able to be more hands-on. It's part of another project of mine called the African Hip-Hop Archive, and it's a way of creating a type of resource on African hiphop that people can tap into.We have the biggest collection of African rap on the continent.The idea was to create a physical archive, but also to organize certain themed exhibitions which will travel to other African cities, so people can see where African hiphop has evolved from,and to Europe as well. It's good for people living in Europe to see what Africa is doing ... There are also a lot of people from Africa living in Europe. Exactly, so it's this constant interaction, because people like me go over there, stay for a while, study, and then we come back. So that's where the idea for this piece developed from,this whole archive project.We'd started to do research on Cape Town hip-hop, because it was the one scene we had the most archival raw footage of, and that was going to be our first proposal.And then this Devious thing happened,so it kind of overtook everything else, and we realized that we were sitting on this huge mountain of footage and stuff that he had done and written. Devious was a rapper first and foremost, but he was also a social activist. He used his music as a tool to speak about issues that he felt are important to normal people's lives. He did a lot of AIDS awareness songs, he did songs about globalization, about gangsterism and the realities of living in the type of environment that he lived in [on the Cape Flats].

To most people, his death was like one of his songs, because these were the kinds of things that he spoke of. He put things together in a way that no one else did â&#x20AC;&#x201D; he'd write about gangsterism in relation to globalization, you know, and this is a guy who'd never been to university. But he was a researcher also: he researched all the subjects that he wrote about really well. What happened was he got stabbed one evening trying to help his father who had been harassed by some gangsters. And he didn't even confront these guys. His mother and father had been walking with his daughter towards their house and these guys were trying to rob his father, but they didn't. So his father decided they were going to walk back towards his house,and what happened was Devious came back to walk with them, because everybody knew him in the area, but these guys were drunk and up to no good.And he didn't even say a word, he had just walked ahead of his parents. Didn't say a word to these guys! And then some weird things happened: his foot got stuck in a drain, he fell ... and that's when they attacked him. It's quite horrific actually. So in relation to the archive, after he died, there was this realization that there was all this footage and information that you could work with. For me this is kind of like the first presentation of the African Hip-Hop Archive. But it has taken on its own existence. It's not about African hip-hop anymore; it's just about Devious, this particular piece. But the reason for doing it is also that most people who die, their lives don't need to be celebrated in this way. But when there are people that other people regard as heroes, as role models, as spokespeople, then there needs to be this kind of looking back at what that person has done. He meant a lot to a lot of people. He didn't just rap, he was teaching people at schools that he'd go around to and talk about drugs and gangsterism, globalization, sustainable development ... He worked for two organizations: CRED (Creative Education for children and youth at risk), and Baobab Connections.org which is a website that's trying to spark a dialogue between Dutch and African youth. COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

MUSTAFA MALUKA IN NEW YORK. FEBRUARY 2004

keep believing Stills from music video MR DEVIOUS 2003

So your thoughts in choosing to stage some kind of memorial were to make it a vehicle through which people are not only going to learn about Devious, but by extension consider a whole range of issues that he explored and spoke about. What were your thoughts around the Cathedral — could this particular work have been presented anywhere else as successfully? For me, when we were going through the Cathedral, that was the only thing I could think of, because I'd already been thinking about doing the memorial to him in some kind of way. But when we went on the tour of the Cathedral,they spoke of Duke Ellington having been buried from the church.And there were also these various different memorials where ashes are kept in the Cathedral, and the AIDS memorial ... so there were these kinds of memorial spaces in there already. So it made sense that this was the kind of piece to do within that space.And it's also New York, and it's hip-hop — New York is the birthplace of hip-hop — so for it to come full circle I thought would be very interesting. It is also, as you say, kind of continuing his activism, because one of his most famous lines,from his song Can Money Buy You, was:"If I die I pray to God that my seeds proceed" — it was just one line from one of his rap songs ... To me it meant two things. Firstly it meant,"If I die, I pray to God my children can proceed and grow," and on the other side, the "seed" is also the seed that he planted in people, the ideas — and that once he's dead his ideas go on and people would take what he has given them and do something with it. So that was my way of responding to that as well. 1 took this as the starting point for everything I have done around him since he died. What form will the piece take? I see my role as that of a curator in a way — I'm not producing any of the pieces myself,they're all existing pieces. I have commissioned a graffiti piece by Mak I and Sky189, because I didn't want it to be about me — me the artist producing an artwork,and the whole ego thing that goes along with that. I wanted it to be about what Devious meant to me — and I've discovered, speaking to other people, that he meant

the same thing to a lot of us who grew up on the Cape Flats. He was the spokesperson, you know. And one thing about spokespeople is they make us lazy.This one thing I said at his memorial in Amsterdam was that after hearing Devious, I didn't want to be a rapper anymore, because he was just so good,and he was saying all these things that I wanted to say, but he was saying it in such a brilliant way.And so I didn't need to be a rapper — there wasn't a need for me to articulate these things. People like Devious make us lazy, or we become lazy because we put all the responsibility on them, because they will speak for us. So when this kind of person gets taken away, then everybody's shocked, because we've put so much responsibility on these people to speak on our behalf. So now who's going to speak on our behalf? And how are we going to replace this person who did all of these good things? Now we need to get back and do things again.And I think that's the shock that a lot of people felt.That's the kind of stuff that's influenced why I wanted to do the memorial. Because in South Africa we have this history of memorials, but the memorials that we have are mainly to old politicians. Only in the last ten years have we started to have memorials to dead musicians, and not even enough.You know, there's lots of struggle heroes on the Cape Flats that people don't know of. Nobody ever does anything in memory of them,something physical, something that will last forever. I felt he was one of those kinds of people. He took the place of these guys that spoke for us before. During apartheid, during the struggle days, we had these political guys talking; and after the end of apartheid we had rappers speaking for people on the Cape Flats — you had people like POC (Prophets of da City), but they've faded,And he grew out of them. Is there a connection in the urgency you felt in finally deciding to leave Amsterdam and come back here and maybe be part of carrying the flag after Devious died? It did influence my decision definitely. I mean I was already thinking of doing it, and it was just becoming clearer and clearer that I needed to be here. That distance when something happens is also incredibly traumatic ... COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

MR DEVIOUS MEMORIAL T-SHIRT DESIGN BY A MEMBER OF INSIDIOUS INC

the realness Mixed media on canvas 183 X 133 CM

2002

Yeah. Because I've had family members who've died in similar circumstances in the last couple of years since I've been over there, but this thing just did so much,and I felt there was some kind of void now. And there need to be people that can fill that void. And I'm not here to fill any void, to represent anything, I need to be here to do what I want to do on him. I could have done it from Amsterdam, but it would have been from a different kind of perspective. For one, I wouldn't have had access to all the family photographs and things, I'd only have the Amsterdam perspective.All the video footage that I'm going to be using in the piece is footage that was mainly shot in Holland, and then the stuff that was shot in Cape Town was shot by Dutch filmmakers. Because during his life he appeared on Dutch TV and radio probably more times than he did on South African TV and radio.There are about three documentaries that were made about him by Dutch filmmakers,and each time that he performed in Amsterdam we filmed everything. Each time he came through I just took pictures of him, as I did of any other African rapper that used to come through [Amsterdam]. But actually the photographs that I took of him in Amsterdam in the end were the images that were used by most of the press after he died, and that's the one time when you realize the power that these images have.The distance made me appreciate people like him more. If I was here I would maybe not go around to rap groups and take photographs. Because people take things for granted at home. But being there, I just couldn't take that for granted.There's this one photograph especially that I took ... of EJ from Godessa with Thomas who started africanhiphop.com and Devious,And it's of the two of them flanking Thomas: he's on his cellphone, and that's how he always is, always on the phone, organizing something to do with hip-hop, and always managing things.At the time I'm saying, "This is going to be an important photo", but I was saying it more because it just catches Thomas at this moment where he's doing what he's doing, a rapper on each side, and him in the middle. But afterwards I realized that it is an important photograph — because Devious is there.You don't realize these things when you're taking the photograph.So I don't take any images that I create for granted.You always think okay,everything is special, and you need to hold onto things, but when things like this happen it shifts things.

In the Museum you'll be showing a number of portrait paintings, which form part of a larger study you've been working on for some time. Can you give me some background to your interest in portraiture: who are the people that you choose to paint, and what are the themes that you explore here? The paintings are from a body of work I produced during my six-year stay in Amsterdam. Over this period of time, I developed a painting style that incorporates elements from various visual languages and traditions, including classical Western painting, pop art and hip-hop graffiti art. My painting style makes use of layering. I apply layers of paint to the surface that speak of the layers of the subject, of their personality and experiences. The faces I choose to paint are usually images that I have collected from magazines.The faces need to speak to me in a way that I can't really describe. There is a certain aura I am trying to capture, of the things that go on beyond just the simple face.The entire picture plane is covered with markings and patterns that speak about the layers of the subject's personality.This aura is very important to the composition of my portraits in that it frames the subject and gives an idea of the complex layers that make up the individual. I am inventing personalities with each portrait because I am using images of people in magazines — fake, posed images — and transforming them into something that speaks to you on a completely different level — images that speak louder than the photographs they were based on. I am inventing personalities as well in that I am translating the photograph into a completely different language,a more complicated language, the language of complex national and cultural entanglements that combine to make up the individual.The images I choose to paint are also iconic. I would like to think of the images I am painting as heroes.

MR DEVIOUS PHOTOGRAPHED BY MUSTAFA MALUKA IN HIS AMSTERDAM STUDIO

unbearable weight Acrylic and oil on canvas 183 X 133 CM

2002

seen it all Acrylic and oil on canvas 183 X 133 CM 2002

1994 Stills from animated video DURATION 1 MIN 55 SEC

2004

1114110.11f#44

1141/4=111111111111

THAN DO

MAMA

Tracy Murinik You've described yourself as "creating digital moving imagery in the tradition of portraiture as a performative form of identity". Can you elaborate? Thando Mama One of the things I go back to again and again is portraiture: using my face, or myself, always "in the picture", you could say ... But there's also the sound, the quality and texture of the video — these play an important part. In the works that I've made for this show,called 1994, I've used two different styles for the images: one being animation — the old style animation where you do frame-byframe drawings, which I scan in and edit ... They're images of you? Yes, I take a photograph of myself, work on it in Photoshop, print it out, then draw on it by hand in pencil, scan it again, rework it in Photoshop, and finally save it to Final Cut (Pro),frame by frame. What happens to the image in the process? The image is basically me lying, kind of floating,getting up,lying down and getting up again,and the movement flows like that on the video.And those figures recall the work that I began to do in 2000/1, where I was starting to look at themes or issues that concern black masculinity. I'm still trying to answer, or to pose more questions around,issues to do with myself, and also portraiture and the whole notion of the moving image. The second video, and the other style I'm playing with, uses myself again — basically half of my face — with a TV screen in the background showing a short loop from Stanley Kubrick's film, A Clockwork Orange. The part that I've borrowed, which you don't necessarily see on the video, is where the main character is subjected to institutional "normalization", and he has to watch this Nazi film of Hitler marching, with Beethoven playing in the background. So there's that,and there's my own image in front of that screen, and it's very dark and bluish — I've worked with the colour,so you can't really see exactly what's happening — but there's a silhouette outline and also some highlights cast on my face from the light of the TV screen.There's also some sound. Last year when I went home for Christmas, we were sitting at the

table and my mother was speaking — she'd been to Robben Island and was telling this story about what people were told as tourists, you know,"This is a prison," or "This is where Mandela was," or "This is where Sobukwe was" ... And she was telling this in quite a dramatic way, so I stole a little bit of her words and her voice, and they come into parts of the video. For me it's also about the country: it's about institutions, it's about political and social comment,but in a subtle way.You have to look closely at the images. For the Museum I've proposed two huge, heavy objects, each with a wooden base and a panel of sandblasted glass. At the bottom of the glass there's a clear space through which the videos will be projected, and at the back of each base is a screen that will catch the image. So the projection will come through the glass, where can you see the image, vaguely, as a transparent thing, and that will be cast onto the back screen. So the image is translated through a type of disturbance created by the sandblasted glass? Exactly. I want the room to be quite dark,so you catch the video, with the light bouncing off the back screen, coming back to the glass again,just forming a very subtle kind of light that highlights the glass. I don't know how people will view it because the glass will stand tall, like these two towers in the middle of the room,with projections onto them,and the audio — my mother's words,and the subtle soundtrack from the film.

THANDO MAMA AT THE CATHEDRAL OF ST JOHN THE DIVINE, FEBRUARY 2004

1994 Detail of mixed media installation

2004

For the Cathedral, I'm presenting 46 objects that draw on the same idea, based on the images I used for the animation in the video, the figures that are constantly getting up and lying back again. But in this case I've hand-painted these images on glass. So you have these glass panels on wooden bases with these lying down,getting up images. Are they also very subtly painted? Well they're quite clear, but you can also see the other side of the glass ... They'll become shifting images. It will be a floor installation, a kind of octagon shape with a cross in the middle. You have identified this piece as creating "a link between the two different physical and ideological spaces" of the Cathedral and the Museum. Can you describe this link? The link exists on a number of levels. First of all, you see the same images appearing on glass and as part of the animation.Another link has to do with what the images say about the body.about the politics of the body, about the black male or black figure. There are times when you cannot really say what kind of person the figure is ... But basically it's myself.

I could put my feet onto, but at the same time I work or deal with a subject and a medium which has not really got a very strong support base. I constantly have to deal with the fact that I might have an idea, an image, but I need something to make it stand up, whether this is sound, or texture, or colour, or the environment it's in.You know, with video art you've got very limited options of presenting your work: basically a TV monitor or a screen or a projection. But how can you take it forward? For me it's very subtle,fragile ground. So I believe these works will help me find some of the answers that I look for, but also broaden my mode of working, so that I'm not stuck in a box! And of course that's a constant challenge. How do you avoid being defined within a single construct? You have to challenge your own boundaries all the time, but it's a difficult place to go, it puts you on the line ... Like I was saying, by producing videos you're not just being a video artist, and by making these objects you're not only a sculptor ... For me, besides the ideas that inform it, the first thing that comes to mind is the image.The image takes on the bigger role: the image for me is what people respond to.

Which makes sense if you're trying to explore the notion of identity not being fixed. It's also fragile: the glass can shatter in which case the images would be lost. The wooden bases and glass panels are evocative in terms of both their materials and their physical forms. You've mentioned that glass is a fragile material that could potentially shatter, and it also creates elusive imagery with things being projected through it, or painted onto it. But the structures themselves are almost tomblike or like small monuments:they combine these very solid bases with something more ethereal ... For me this also has personal meaning, in that I've metaphorically had to find a very strong base that COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

1994 Stills from video DURATION 1 MIN 55 SEC

2004

hiding the naked body photograph, paper construction 2000

Tell me about your choice of title, 1994? It's obviously an evocative moment in South Africa's history. It's a point of reference, a symbolic year.Those 46 pieces reference the years between when apartheid was formally or officially implemented,and the years from 1990 to 1994 when it gradually disintegrated. Each image that lies on the floor represents the years when people went through these experiences, through forced removals,struggles over education ... So I don't want these images to be like images in history books, but to in a way put myself in there as an image, as a body, as a figure — and as very obvious black paint on the glass. I feel that people are still building now — they have that solid ground, but maybe they have this very fragile self that has been carried from that period,from that time.They might break down at any moment, you never know, or maybe they're being reinforced with a willingness to look forward to the future — post-I994, which is now.And then the work was not made in 1994, it's made in 2004,ten years later, so it's got all these other notions about democracy so far. I'm interested in the memorial element in this work: it recognizes the potential of 1994, but also what has been lost or repressed. I've always wanted to take on the whole notion of history and memory.Throughout Africa and the diaspora,one of the things that is very widely debated and contested is the notion of the identity of people that reside on this continent.And that has some connection with how I started looking at myself, at my own identity, who I am ... For the past four years I've been looking at these things, and now I'm thinking,"What about looking forward?" There was a point where I thought this project might actually be a starting point where I can look at history, the present, the future — history as a whole.And I feel I've started to deal with that.There are things that I want to do in the present in order to create a space or a stage for the things that might come afterwards,And these things go beyond what I make — they have to do with access to resources, spaces, more recognition of media arts in formal institutions, perhaps even having spaces that deal with digital or media arts specifically, spaces that are equipped and

set up to support that.And I believe we need to get these things done because there are a lot of guys who have creative images in their heads that they want to put out there, people who are still up-andcoming, people who are still in art school ... I want to take that forward, create the groundwork for it to exist. Because in order for me to get inspiration, to keep on being productive, I need a space to explore what 1 do.These things are more than images, more than what we paint or draw or put into installations. You're one of the few artists on the show who has identified the Museum space, rather than the Cathedral, as presenting the greatest challenge to work in. What you're describing here seems to clarify that because, as I understand it, you're engaging the Museum as a type of "digital activist" — choosing to challenge your own production? I think that's where my passion lies. If I want to create images, borrow images, make up images, I need the necessary resources to work with those images,and space and a receptive audience.... I think that for people who work with more established platforms, whether painting or sculpture, printmaking or photography, people and institutions tend to be more accepting. But when,for example,a computer speaks to people when they come to an exhibition, or when things are triggered by movement ... perhaps if there's a space which is committed to that, then things will start moving — good financial support for projects,good attendance at openings ... People will appreciate what you're doing.

100

suka afrika fundudzi Samson Mudzunga prepares for performance DOPENI. LIMPOPO July 3 2004

SAMSON

MUDZUNGA

Samson Mudzunga first briefed me, in characteristically intriguing and elusive style, about the work he was planning for Personal Affects in late February 2004. We were in New York, at a Starbucks in Chelsea, on a Saturday morning. We sat at a table sipping still water and chatting. A few days later, in a feedback session where he was to describe these ideas to the exhibition's curators, I discovered that he had spontaneously appointed me to explain his proposal on his behalf. Five months later we met again to continue our discussion. We're back in South Africa, but about as far north of the country as we can go:the province of Limpopo, named after the great river that runs through this region, previously known as Venda — home to Mudzunga and the mythical, natural Lake Fundudzi. This time, another Saturday morning, we chat not over still water, but about still water, namely that of the lake. Because it is this lake that informs much of Mudzunga's art and his position within his community: the metaphorical ripples that this still water generates within that cultural context are strongly mythological and political. I speak to him before his performance, a going-away celebration for his new drums, about to be shipped to New York.

When they saw my work,they said that never has anyone in the world done something like this before — like when I buried myself.[Mudzunga has, over the past few years, enacted a number of"burials" and "resurrections" of himself, often as a challenge to Venda tradition and hierarchy, invoking both the ire and astonishment of some senior members of his community.] They'd never seen anything like that. You see, my power is from the lake, because once I drink the water from the lake, I feel my strength like anything. And then I can't do anything without drinking the water from the lake.

Tracy Murinik Tell me about the title of the work, Suka Afrika Fundudzi. What does it mean?

People were jealous of me because I went to the lake.And then this man — the headman,Samuel Netshiavha, my relative — came to me and took away the lake and said I can't go there. He said I think I'm a chief ... And then he made a plan: he burnt his kraal [homestead], and went to the police and said, "That man burnt my kraal, you must go and arrest him." And when they asked him,"Why do you say it's him?" he said,"Because I won't allow him to go to the lake." And that's why I won this case when they questioned me.

Samson Mudzunga It means I'm trying to unite these people, the people of Dopeni village and the people of South Africa, to come together and build our nation and our culture. But these people, they said I'm a mad man. Why did they say that? They said I must get away from here,that they don't want to see me doing these funny things.And I said, "Okay, you can say that, but you can't stop me." What were you doing that they thought you were mad?

Is that when you make your work? That's right, because if I drink the water from the lake, I dream about what I am going to do tomorrow. What are you going to do for your performance now? For my performance, everyone will see for himself. I can't say. Everybody must start thinking about what this means ... when the man from jail came out after nearly five years. When were you in jail? I was arrested in 1998. Why did they arrest you?

You showed me the chains that go with the drum. 1 can't tell you about that.You are going to see it yourself.

SAMSON MUDZUNGA IN NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 2004

103

suka afrika fundudzi Samson Mudzunga emerges from drum during performance DOPENI, LIMPOPO July 3 2004

Is this performance about you being free? That's right. I won the case. Now this man [his gallerist, Michael Stevenson, who has been tasked with unlocking the padlocked chains around Mudzunga's feet], he must free me.And then he must say,"He's a free man,and now he can work, hard." How do you think your community will react? They'll be surprised,they'll really be surprised.They're going to get a shock. You made the drum out of a very specific type of wood. You said there were only two trees in this area with this kind of wood. What is so special about this wood?

art historians, curators and artists. The performance consists of a number of dramatic symbolic components. After witnessing blessings of praise and support for Mudzunga from the queen, the crowd is ordered to move to the front of the house in anticipation of Mudzunga's entrance. All goes quiet while we wait. The drama is carefully orchestrated, and we stand watching the door to Mudzunga's lounge,from which he is supposed to emerge. Then his son, McCoy Nemakhavhani, arrives to introduce him. "You have arrived at Suka's place - Afrika; the man who survived by drinking the water from the lake. Those who hate him will not hate him anymore. Because their chance has now come to an end."

suka afrika fundudzi Tshikona dance, performance DOPENI, LIMPOPO July 3 2004

This tree is the musuma tree. It's very strong. How long have you making drums?

Mudzunga emerges from behind the door, shackled with wooden chains. He begins to speak in Tshivenda, while McCoy translates for him in English.

I've been making special drums since 1992. Who taught you to make drums? Once I drink the water from the lake I've got power. Have you always played the drums? No, I knew nothing, but I can play ... I make the drums for the Tshikona dance - they use the drums. Sometimes they say that when you hit this drum in the Tshikona dance, if you do it well, rain will come. Do you know the Tshikona dance? You will see it. You see,this is you [he points to the female carving on the drum], it's a lady.That is a man [he points to a male carving on the other side of the drum]. I come from a mother and father. I will get inside the drum for a few minutes,and then when I come out, I will be another man!That's all ... Tell everybody that we are ready to start. Hundreds of people have arrived to bear witness - children and adults from the Dopeni community and surrounding areas, the queen of the village and her family, and urbanites in the form of journalists,

"I think everybody knows what happened to Mr Mudzunga the previous years. The man was arrested for what he's doing. This man was doing these things for so many years, and then he did this thing, he said he was going to bury himself alive. That is why the chief and other people were against him and he ended up in jail for that reason. He was in jail for four years. Now as from today, Mr Michael Stevenson is going to unchain him as a sign that the man is going to do his job free, no one's going to disturb him anymore ... Amandla! Viva ANC, viva! Now Mr Michael is going to unchain him." Stevenson goes forward and unlocks the padlock that holds the wooden shackles in place. There is huge applause from the crowd as the chains drop to the floor, and Mudzunga holds them up triumphantly. "Everybody can see what is happening today. I think this will be the first opportunity in the whole world,the project COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

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suka afrika fundudzi Detail of wooden lock and chain 2004

that is going to be happening here is going to be the first project that's going to be happening in our village. Viva government of ANC, viva!"

I am starting to plan a project which will be called Suka Afrika.

We're told to go on with our own business: Mudzunga says he needs a rest after jail, so he's going to sit quietly.

We are going to work with different dance groups, teaching them. Here, at my place, we are going to build a special rondawel [hut], which we are going to work from. It will be ready in about 12 months' time.

Again, his timing is perfect. Just as people are starting to abandon their curiosity as to what will happen next, the new drums are taken down to another setting, below the house, and Mudzunga is ready to continue his performance. The extraordinary Tshikona dance starts up again a complex arrangement of pipe trumpets played to sound out a progressively hypnotic, mounting sequence, like pealing bells, impeccably co-ordinated with simultaneously complex dance moves. Mudzunga arrives in the centre of the drumming circle, around which the dance is happening. He is wearing long grey pants, a longsleeved cotton shirt and brown leather closed shoes. He opens the door of the drum and manoeuvres himself inside. The door of the drum closes. And Mudzunga is officially "gone". The crowd rushes forward to see, aghast. The music starts up again, and the drum that Mudzunga has just entered is initiated and played. Tensions are high; the music is reaching a feverish pitch; at least fifteen or more minutes have passed since Mudzunga disappeared. And then, as spontaneously as it closed, the door of the drum shoots back open. Carefully somebody emerges: he's wearing a white T-shirt that says, "Suka Afrika Fundudzi", short, stripy pants, echoing the fabric that lines the drum, white socks and brown shoes. This is the new Samson Mudzunga.

What is the project about?

Do the people in your community know what you are planning to do? Yes, they know. Are they excited? Even if they don't like it, they will come, because I am helping them. You said that your performance was going to change things for you in the community. That's right. I'm another person.There is support for me ... There are a lot of people who aren't working: young kids - they're so naughty, drinking ... So if I can get a project going where they come to dance, then when they stop dancing they can't go and make mischief, they'll go home because they'll be tired - they will go home to sleep. What do you think people are going to say when they see your work in New York? They're going to think,"That man!" I know the people of New York are going to be surprised. It will be the first time in the world that something like this has happened, because I will get in the drum,and hit the drum, and show them these stories. Are you going to do the same performance? Yes, the same.Viva Afrika! [Long live Africa!]

Before your performance you told me that when you came out of the drum, you were going to be a different person. Who have you become,and what will this new person do? COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

suka afrika fundudzi Detail from performance DOPENI. LIMPOPO July 3 2004

suka afrika fundudzi (overleaf) Tshikona dance, performance DOPENI. LIMPOPO July 3 2004

from before Performance by Siwela Sonke Company NELSON MANDELA SQUARE, SANDTON. JOHANNESBURG PHOTO: SUZY BERNSTEIN

2003

JAY PATH ER Tracy Murinik People might wonder what a choreographer is doing on a visual art exhibition. But, although your core medium is dance, your work constantly challenges the traditional boundaries of how and where that medium operates: it is regularly site-specific, and you often collaborate with artists, bringing in video and photographic components. All these elements push the boundaries of both dance and visual art. Can you tell me more about what your work tries to do formally and conceptually? Jay Pother In the late 1970s/early 1980s, my work combined dance and performance,which also included sound and the word,together with visual imagery. But because a lot of the work was commenting on apartheid and the regime at that time, the use of factual information very often precluded the work's existence, and actually led to it being banned.What I would do was work closely with 16mm films which I got from Paratus, the [apartheid-era] Department of Information — the propaganda machine of the army — and juxtapose that with moving bodies.That's where a lot of it started. I think, then, one needed a range of media, mixed media and new media, to be able to connect with the sophistication of the apartheid system, and the sophistication of one's response to it. And beyond that, there was my awareness that even in "deepest, darkest Africa", we lead extremely sophisticated, postmodern lives. So even if we're involved with traditional ritual, or connected to that in any way, it is through complex, postmodern framing. So increasingly a lot of my work,with the use of different media,and also coming from a visual arts perspective, is to locate ways of seeing, rather than just what is being looked at.

So we had the same event but looked at through different frames and idioms.And for me that connects with what 1 keep viewing as a paradox — a particularly African paradox,and most especially a South African paradox — which is these layerings of regimes, ideologies, ways of being:from the acutely traditional to the very crisply postmodern. One is vacillating or moving in and out of those liminal phases quite rapidly, and for me that framing is best served by performances that really do engage that. I think that, ultimately, my early training locates me in the theatre, so even though I'd now like to get entirely formal about everything, I'm very located in how emotion is key,and very often my works connect with some kind of large emotion. So Hotel was connected with secrets, with the telling and keeping of secrets. It's located in a kind of psychological drama ... That's at the core, but the way it's looked at has become far more interesting, so it's not just the replication of that central emotion, but how many different points of view one can have in one frame.

The work that I'll be presenting in the Museum for African Art, Hotel, best typifies that kind of framing. First of all it's a work I did inside a hotel room, with an audience of about twelve or fourteen.And I had photographer Jo Ractliffe document these performances.The idea with these CityScope performances [which Hotel was a part of], as well as with Home, was that a visual artist would document and interpret the work,And so there was my version, there was her version, and then there was my overall version of how that was installed in an art gallery. COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

JAY PATHER AT THE CATHEDRAL OF ST JOHN THE DIVINE, NEW YORK. FEBRUARY 2004

COPYRI

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hotel Performance by Siwela Sonke Company with video projections by Jo Ractliffe NATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL, GRAHAMSTOWN PHOTO:SUZY BERNSTEIN

2003

I'm interested in how you've examined the notion of "home" as another shifting concept in recent work. You describe "establishing and unraveling identity markers". Can you discuss this in relation to Kitchen, another work that you proposed to present?

somehow the Land Act has finally seen to giving it back to whom it rightfully belongs to ... You know, until all those things really hit you in the face, it's almost as if one really does need that. So the home for me is an acute symbol of sanctity and the paradox of static comfort, as well as the desire to flee at the same time.

I think the dominant thing about the home is the notion that it is something static,fixed, a place of comfort and security:"home sweet home",or"home is where the heart is"; and in a kind of hip parlance, "homeboy" and "homegirl". So no matter which frame, whether it's a traditional or a postmodern one,the notion of"home" as something that is a place of fairly static comfort is quite prevalent. I was quite interested in how home is both this security, but also something that one wants to flee from,or something that is under siege and that home is actually a series of temporary spaces.The home is not that refuge that you seek in between these states of flux. It is, in itself, flux; it contains flux.

Why did you choose these particular works to show in New York at this time?

In the actual production I make use of quite static objects,for example a table and four chairs for a kitchen, or a kitchen dresser, and three plates and three cups ... There are all these quite definitive identity markers.And then within the traditional kitchen, there's the identity marker of the burning impepho [an aromatic herb], and the cross.At the very beginning there is a slight discomfort because there's a cross with a live Jesus, or a live actor with his arms spread out like Jesus Christ ... There's a slight sense of discomfort, but it's quite static.And I hoped that in the piece, without creating an atom bomb in the kitchen, you know there's that clichĂŠ of the pot slowly boiling until it falls off the stove completely because it is so hot inside ... but then of course you replace the lid, and things do move on. I'm aware that these symbols of stasis are very important in our lives, and I think we need that. I think that even if it's the illusion of something that is static, I think we're aware of its transience, its flux, but we still need it. So you might go to a hotel in New York or in Amsterdam,or wherever, and if you are able to re-arrange the furniture ... you rework it so that there is a semblance that it is your space, even though it isn't â&#x20AC;&#x201D; of course until you go back home and your house has been taken over because your bond's not paid, or it has been repossessed, or

New York is a very charged space right now,and the combination of this and South Africa's ten years of democracy bring discourses together in quite a powerful way.The works seem to be located in specific, static, even traditional identity markers, but at the same time in a space like New York they connect with a kind of flux. I think the first thing that someone told me on September I I was,"The world will never be the same again." And in a very curious way that was true (particularly as tragedies of a similar scale have happened and continue to happen in other parts of the world). But I do think it is symptomatic of a more crucial flux than the fashionable stream of consciousness variety, and with it shifting priorities and identities, either the reinforcement of nationalism or a critique of it. Now such issues are quite central to South Africa right now,trying to decide,"Are we going to come out of one Group Area and walk into another Group Area," you know,one kind of tradition into another kind of tradition, or come to terms with fluidity and malleability and actually a healthy uncertainty that may indeed be our salvation.

from before (previous spread) Performance by Siwela Sonke Company NELSON MANDELA SQUARE, SANDTON, JOHANNESBURG PHOTO:SUZY BERNSTEIN

2003

115

kitchen Performance by Siwela Sonke Company DURBAN ART GALLERY. DURBAN PHOTOS: STORM JANSE VAN RENSBURG

2003

Which takes us to your "inter-cultural infusion", your "grand epic" on the steps of the Cathedral ... Tell me about From Before. At the core of that is again a quite emotionally charged moment which is then reconfigured on a visual epic. But here that axis of emotion is actually just the meeting of two people from quite diverse backgrounds — an urban skateboarder and a rural woman.And that was based on something that I saw — a similar kind of meeting of two people, and that awkwardness ... It made me connect with the idea that these meetings are highly possible, and highly probable, and so impossible at the same time. All the ingredients are there, you know, it's "all dressed up and nowhere to go", because the only way to go is into each other — and I don't think we are ready for that; or somehow we're not going into each other, it would seem to me.So the vast epic of dancers is a kind of backdrop that serves as either baggage that stops us from doing that, one can say, or maybe we can say that these are remnants,identity markers that are going to slowly slip away and that a kind of infusion of essences is just going to happen. And then one also has to ask, is this infusion of cultures such a big deal anyway? I think the more we ask those questions honestly, the more we are going to be able to catapult ourselves into some kind of infusion. Because I think that's the big question:"Why is this important?""Why should I know about your culture? I should tolerate you as a human being, why do I need to know more about you?" And I think when one asks those questions, then one can figure out whether this whole experience is a worthwhile one.What are those moments all about?

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apotheosis Oil on canvas 270 X 214 CM 2004

JOHANNES PHOKELA Tracy Murinik You've mentioned that in Europe, where you're based, you're considered as an "African artist". And I think this is a challenge for any artist from South Africa, or from outside Europe or the United States. Often, even though you're studying, living, practising as a full-time artist in Europe, your origin determines expectations of what you should produce. But when your work actually takes on Western codes and histories, and you start messing with those codes, how do people respond to this? Johannes Phokela I get all kinds of responses really, but first and foremost I'd like to emphasize that the "African artist" rhetoric is a media term.All artists, regardless of colour, regard themselves as people who are making art.And that's prior to any form of identity. It always comes across as a puzzle to me when notions of colour, race, gender, come into it, because I think they have nothing to do with the work. Once you have the work it doesn't really matter who produced it.What counts is the quality. But unfortunately, the contemporary international art scene has this tendency to dwell on the background of the artist. How do you respond if people ask you where Africa is in your work? I tell them that it's up to them to find it. Essentially an artist has nothing to say, because they've already said it in their work.That's how artists communicate. If people want answers regarding their own expectations, I suppose I can offer them something — if they pay me for it! If they want me to be an actor, then I will be an actor for them. Provided I get paid for it. Let's go back to your words,"toying with the myths placed upon their aesthetic values as the epitome of cultural perfection"... I wrote that because I thought it sounded really, really good,and it does — it's another form of acting as well. There are so many elements and layers in what I do. Baroque and classical art have as much iconographic value as Hollywood movies. For instance, you get lots of Blake posters in common households in the townships,or Leonardo da Vinci,for example, The Last Supper, or Jesus Christ with two fingers up, like the

hippie sign — these are images that people are familiar with.And to a certain extent the iconological impact of these images to people who believe in Jesus Christ, as someone blonde, nice and clean with no beard or anything, when you say that this is not Jesus Christ himself, this is actually an image by Leonardo da Vinci, and he got some young boy,some castrato to pose for him, they don't see it that way, they believe that this is actually the image of Jesus Christ.When you think of it, having died presumably 2000 years ago, who would really know the image of Jesus Christ? And it's actually said in the bible that he had brown feet and curly hair ... Often the image presented is that of the European, almost as a semi-erotic figure or portrait. So I like playing with these images. Can you describe your conceptual process in that regard? Every work that I do is conceptually based. I'm not a conceptualist, but I use ideas in my work.The process is very simple: I start off with an image that appeals to me,and gradually change it into something else. Often what I intentionally set out to achieve ends up being the least obvious aspect of the work. I'll be doing this painting of David Blaine [who has recently done performances in which he starves himself for extended periods in public, inside a glass box].That Blaine figure may land up being someone else, you know. It could be George Bush; it could be myself — as a god [laughs].Very, very basic: that's how I work. Eventually I'd like to end up with nothing: start a new work and end up with nothing. I haven't gone that far yet, I guess I'm a little bit scared. Some people have described my work as idiosyncratic, and I never knew what that was supposed to mean, but I can almost empathize with that perception on the basis that I try to make work about things and issues that people know about. Bringing in media, aspects of humanity? Exactly.You could say, for instance, that painting is not a new thing. It goes back to the caves. I'd totally refute the perception that my work is conceptual. It's conceptual, but it's not conceptualist. I don't recognize any stylistic movement or approach to making art.What I do is informed by my educational background and personal experiences.And I use traditional media. COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

JOHANNES PHOKELA IN CAPE TOWN, JUNE 2004

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fall of the damned Left-hand panel of diptych Oil on canvas 287.5 X 223.5 X 4 CM

1993

I was thinking more of the conceptual shift that happens with the changes you make to those original works. Well, take a piece I made called Land of Cockaigne, which consists of two images: the basic one is Bruegel's image of paradise — Cockaigne, I think, is the Latin term for paradise — where he has all his figures lying down,all sipping water from the fountain. The actual fountain itself is taken from a painting by Rubens titled Garden of Love.And in my painting, there's Rubens outside his mansion, his friends drinking, enjoying his success and everything, and on the facade of the mansion there are all these statues and cherubs, kind of garden statues, and there's this one of a female figure spewing milk from her breasts, instead of water. So I've actually created my own fountain.And on the basin of the fountain there are four notches,and these guys are lying down drinking, and I suppose the conceptualization there is something that you don't see straight away, but which comments on Western appropriation of raw materials from developing countries. You've often looked at issues of cultural or economic dependence in your work, specifically in relation to Europe, where you've played with the VOC (Dutch East India Company),for example. Can you elaborate on that? The main point of my focus on the 17th century is because it's an interesting time in European history in terms of finance and commerce. It's the time when the first world bank was created, the first stock exchange,the first multinational companies; it was when the West was expanding — there was this rush to grab land, and the Dutch were the masters of it. And at the time that England established its bank, the Dutch were almost the centre of finance in the world,And how the British established themselves as an economic empire depended on all the moves that were initially made by the Dutch. So I'm looking at a particular period, and I'm trying to compare it to the world economic situation right now.There seem to be so many similarities in that ... Some people might say I'm being critical or satirical. but I'm not.1 think it's better to make jokes about politics than to make serious indictments about governments.

Can those jokes not be satirical? It depends on the viewer.When you look at my work,there's no straightforward answer. I want to show that I'm interested in an element of amusement. It's like making comics — I'm making comics really. Tell me a bit more about Baroque culture in the 16th and 17th centuries, and how you're playing with those elements in your work. Baroque is the spirit of today's international culture and economics.The term "baroque" in itself means irregular, but basically it refers to the Western appropriation of our cultures. Baroque replaced Mannerism,and Mannerism failed because it was too infused with religion.So Italy, back in the 17th century, ceased to be centre of the arts and was replaced by the Netherlands, because the Netherlands was bringing together all these different elements.The Baroque movement started in Italy itself, and then the upper countries took that even further, if you look at Rembrandt,Van Dijk, Rubens.And that was highly influenced by social, religious and economic politics at the time. Rubens,for instance, was a staunch Catholic and was working for the courts. He also had a desire to represent peasant culture — you see that element in his work, although it was not that strong, but that was almost his main conviction in his work. He couldn't do that for economic reasons, he couldn't work like some Dutch painters recording day-to-day life.At the time it was regarded as unsound, inferior to court painting, even though court painting was there to glorify aristocrats and dictators. I'm interested in that kind of shift where Baroque not only embraces local peasant culture, but also encompasses other cultures. I'm trying to look at those issues and compare them to today. For instance the way Western countries trade today, we get told that one currency's stronger than the other. Like if we take the banana,for instance, which is often used in my work.You're told that the banana contains the basic ingredients of Prozac, and that it is rich in so many minerals and good for energy — during the Wimbledon tennis tournament,something like 800 tons of bananas get consumed.And yet banana has no value in comparison to apple. Apple grows in Europe, it's not imported — it grows

in abundance — while banana's imported, but COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

121

fall of the damned Right-hand panel of diptych Canvas, rabbit skin glue, cotton twine, enamel paint 287.5 X 223.5 X 4 CM 1993

regardless of that, banana's still really cheap. But one thing I know for sure: if banana grew in Europe, and was imported to Africa, then Africans wouldn't be able to eat it. And economics plays on those perceptions. I'm trying to subvert those ideas, turn them around. Essentially you can look at my entire conceptualization of European classical art in the same light: making work that I'm not supposed to make. I don't know why I'm not supposed to make that work. Has anyone ever told you you're not supposed to make that work? Well, you know,you get people who are pan-Africanist who say,"But brother, there isn't anything African about your work.Why don't you do something that's really African?" and I say to them,"Do you mean using three colours: red, green and yellow? Is that what you want?""Yeah,something to do with roots, brother." And I've constantly rebelled against that. That's a really shallow perception of what Africa's supposed to be.The idea that if it's an African object of art it's an artefact, but if a European artist were to take that artefact and put their signature on it, it becomes an artwork. So I play with all these kinds of perceptions. And coming back to those panAfricanist commentators, often they're the people who are driving BMWs and using mobile phones, and you ask them,"Don't those objects all come from Europe?" And they can't answer that one. What I do is not stealing, it's not plagiarism. I wouldn't mind if it was plagiarism ... Because what I initially set out to do was to defy all those myths about Africa, and also to emphasize that copying in itself had its own life, its own energy.We've almost reached killing this concept of authenticity in art. Tell me a bit about the new work you're proposing to make which is based on a Last Judgment theme, and features David Blaine's glass box set against a backdrop of famine victims. I don't know what you'd call it — performance, selfexposure? When Blaine suspended himself in a glass cube in London, I was amazed by the media response to him.A lot of superstars and other people went to see him.What came into my mind was that if

those media ploys could be used to expose famine in Africa, it would be a great thing. I wanted to bring that plight into focus. I'm interested in your personal response to his endeavour, because the idea shifts quite dramatically according to who's in the box. Blaine has become an icon of what is understood if someone is in a glass box, but the thing is that a lot of people reacted very strongly to the audacity of somebody willfully starving himself for media attention when there were in fact real victims starving out there. I was wondering what it would mean to shift the character of who is inside the box in your work. Well, essentially the box is an iconography based on Blaine, but whoever gets in the box will in a way signify what Blaine did — that's why I said it could be anybody. But I'm thinking that, for example, putting George Bush in the box might imply his complicity in sustaining famine or economic dependence by Africa on the West; but putting Nelson Mandela in the box would perhaps see him identifying the plight of famine victims and making a plea for assistance. You see, I've created a new theme. I've been working on the world aid charity scene for some time. Now I'm trying to create Blaineism, which is another form — almost the reverse of world aid. In world aid you get the superstars using charity as a way of getting back into the limelight, and I've done quite a lot about that and will go back to that theme as an aspect in my work. But now I've come almost to the reverse of that: Blaineism aids exhibition of oneself, showing how things are — maybe he wasn't aware that his"performance" would imply something else. It's almost like saying that if you want to see how Africa starves, this is essentially it. And that is more powerful than an art performance for me. It's like saying,"Hey,this is what the situation is." He's actually brought a new angle to an old debate.

diamonds and bananas are forever Acrylic paint on canvas, rabbit skin glue, cotton twine, enamel paint 287.5 X 223.5 X 4 CM 1993

X•121:110:1120116114C

ROBIN

RHODE

Tracy Murinik Your working practice up till now has been based predominantly on performance. But performance — in front of an audience anyway — doesn't feature in your proposal for Personal Affects. You've spoken about making a work that focuses on "the use of space" to interrogate economic and social value, and to "examine the assumptions of democracy". You've also mentioned wanting to produce an unlimited series of prints featuring "tiny drawings based on repressed memories" around certain geographical locations in New York. What memories will you be working with? And can you describe what the work will look like? Robin Rhode Let me explain how these ideas came about. Firstly they've emerged from being an artist in the diaspora [Rhode lives in Berlin].That has been a major turning point for me. Not being fluent in German,and being away from South Africa, I've had to develop new ways of realizing artworks, and develop a new way of interacting with my environment. I don't have the same luxury of space that I had in South Africa. South Africa doesn't have the same controls as societies in Europe or the Western world. In Berlin I do not have access to walls — they're not as freely accessible as in South Africa. And that has been a turning point for me because I've had to examine my own identity and my own experiences as an adolescent — I'm almost going back and using that as a starting point.

So I saw these objects, and after a while I thought, "This object reminds me of ..." It started rekindling memories,childhood memories of how a sofa could become a motorbike.As a child, if you put your legs over the backrest of the sofa, it could become a motorbike, or a horse. It wouldn't just become a playground; it's not a jungle gym. It's an object that had a particular reference in your imagination as a child. So I became really interested in how I could examine these childhood experiences through these objects lying on the street. I think the sofa was an important starting point for me. It was like,"It's a sofa. Okay,fine." How could I work with the sofa? Obviously I couldn't pick it up and carry it into a studio or whatever. So I would just go back home and make sketches on A4 paper. I'd make these sketches as an instructional diagram as to how to turn the sofa into a horse, or a motorbike. I'd draw arrows,and I'd draw a child's figure, and I'd draw the sofa.And I'd place the drawing on the sofa and leave it there. So I would find these objects on the street and interact with them by seeing how they fitted into my childhood, and then place these diagrams on the objects as something like anonymous instruction manuals.

In Berlin I'd walk down the street and see these objects lying on the pavement — it happens in New York as well.You encounter these objects — like a sofa, a couch, an old mattress or bath or washing basin — just lying on the street.And I became interested in these particular objects and how, as a South African, I would engage with them differently. I know in South Africa it wouldn't take long for a mattress or couch to disappear off the pavement. There's a different need,there's a different economic value, a different understanding of material wealth. Here people leave their disused furniture on the street and it stays there for weeks and weeks. In South Africa someone would come and claim ownership of that object within hours, and recycle that object into their homes within minutes. COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

ROBIN RHODE AT THE CATHEDRAL OF ST JOHN THE DIVINE, NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 2004

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untitled/sofa Photographic documentation of intervention: diagram on found sofa 2004

Did you ever follow these up, go back to see if they had been found? I found some drawings, although sometimes they would just blow away within minutes or hours of being placed on the object. Or if it rained,the drawing would almost disappear off the paper. But I would document this â&#x20AC;&#x201D; I'd photograph the object and then I'd photograph the drawing and then the drawing placed on the object. So the entire work now exists as a body of slides. Regarding the New York exhibition, I was interested in creating a work where I would exclude my body.We spoke before about the fact that I've been working mostly with performance, but I was really interested in shifting my body outside of the frame and focusing rather on space and drawings.These drawings don't claim ownership;they claim ownership of memory, but it's completely anonymous.And if someone else were to encounter these objects and drawings ... I'd want this art to have almost an educational function, or an instructional function that somehow shifts away from the creation of a cultural object. It's not a sculpture, it's not an installation, it's just a work of art that exists as a slide piece.And for this exhibition, I didn't even want to show the work in a venue. I wanted a work that went directly into a publication. I didn't want to show the work as slides. I don't think there's a need for the work to actually exist as a slide show, or in any particular venue. I would really prefer to have the photographs of these drawings and objects just existing, translating directly into a publication, with text.That's how I imagined this body of work.As a slide show it would be transformed back into an institutional space.

And if you had to take the original and put it in a gallery space, it would deny its original intent to begin with? I was hoping that the work wouldn't exist as an artwork in an exhibition space.And I've taken this position because of the context of this show: this is a South African show,and I wanted to create a new balance, shift the balance in the South African art context. I want to shift away from the value of the cultural object as such. I want to create a new language system â&#x20AC;&#x201D; a language system that I started experimenting with here in Berlin.Through being an artist in the diaspora, I've had to find new ways of creating works of art, and new ways of interacting with my environment.And this is what I've come up with. I thought this could translate very nicely into the city of New York. I think the South African context has really shaped and influenced my decision on this particular exhibition. I believe that as a South African artist I don't want to create a work of art, I want to create potential. Not art. Potential.

You also mentioned producing prints of these drawings. Would these potentially be displayed? I was considering showing the actual drawings, the original drawings before they were placed. I think that for me they wouldn't work as posters.That would mean I'd need to scan the drawing before I placed it on the object,so the work would actually be filtered into something else.The work would turn into something else. COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

ROBIN RHODE AT THE CATHEDRAL OF ST JOHN THE DIVINE. NEW YORK. FEBRUARY 2004

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untitled/bed Photographic documentation of intervention: diagram on found mattress 2004

Can you explain your reference to "the assumptions of democracy"? I need to question the idea of identity, and allow art to question democracy. Your work is known for its sense of street smart and urban suss. Now you're in the diaspora, negotiating your own presence and identity in relation to other cities, whether Berlin or New York ... I'm interested in the fact that your interventions might remain anonymous, but they're certainly about bringing your own presence and South African history into spaces where they might never be understood, but are nonetheless formulated in a very specific environment. In South Africa, it was very important for me to work in a public realm.And the reason was because I took a political position to change the viewership, or the role of the viewer. I wanted to take art to people who have no access to understanding the nature of contemporary art in South Africa.That audience is different in the European context. I don't have that luxury, I don't have those viewers. But I still have to have that public role. I still have to interact somehow, no matter how subtly. I feel that this particular project for New York is quite subtle. I believe that this method of working can still translate for viewers who do not visit contemporary art spaces. It is something that's in the public, that is anonymous: if someone interacts or finds these drawings, so be it.Those are the moments that are important, but I don't think it's the end of the work. Will you have any specific route or a map that will pinpoint where your interventions take place?

I think this is something I've been having to deal with in my growth as an artist â&#x20AC;&#x201D; I'm really trying to be free.And it's difficult to be free, to be free of a particular path. So I'm trying to avoid a particular geography or route as such. Specifically from a South African perspective, there are many things that are allowing me to think in this way about this particular project.There are other exhibitions where I can show photographs and where I can do performances, installations. But with this particular project, I'm reaching a point where I want to take the next step. I want to create the potential for new process in my own work,and for South African art,so that it doesn't always have to be about the creation of a cultural object. I'm really trying to test myself and free myself of all of these things, and just engage with space: foreign spaces, unknown spaces,an unknown geography ... I think the context of this exhibition has allowed me to take this position. Because it doesn't function as the umbrella South African show â&#x20AC;&#x201D; as a concept, I think it challenges that notion, it insists that people are playing with the potentialities of their own identities. It's about individual acts. Yes, it's a selection of South African artists, but these artists are not uniform in any fact other than that they emerge from South Africa. With the South African show specifically I want to take the opportunity to explore something else, to challenge myself. I want to create ideas of potential: where does this lead me as a South African artist? I think the work examines all of that, I think it questions all of that.These are the reasons I've decided to work in this manner within this particular exhibition.

No, I don't have a map. It could have been between specific geographical locations in New York, but I don't think that I should follow a particular route because I want the work to be more autonomous. I think that I could make the works anywhere in New York, whether uptown Manhattan, downtown Manhattan, Harlem, Queens, Brooklyn, Long Island, anywhere. It doesn't have to follow a particular course.The works have to be free of that.And COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

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the free girl Jacaranda wood, enamel paint 123 CM HIGH WORK IN PROGRESS PHOTO: JOHN HODGKISS

2004

CLAUDETTE SCHREUDERS Tracy Murinik When you proposed your sculpted figure for the Cathedral, you described her as being completely gorgeous and seductive ... Claudette Schreuders My first sculpture, Lokke, was based on a religious martyr — but contemporary. That's why I'm so excited to exhibit in the Cathedral — there's an inspiration.When I was in Mexico recently, there was an article in the newspaper about a particular saint who features in the slums — a skeleton in saint's clothing.And the people who pray to her are really down and out, prostitutes or whatever, and you could pray that your robbery goes successfully, or that you get a lot of clients ... It's a saint that won't judge you. She's a big cult in those areas.That's a bit like what I want to do. It's not virtuous; it's like good and bad aren't that simple, they're connected. You've described the figure as simultaneously referring to the Mami Wata(a water spirit with cult following in Nigeria and other parts of West Africa), the Watermeisie(a similar cult figure in South Africa) and the Madonna. I'm interested in how they become fused, almost inhabiting flip sides of one another — the Madonna who represents selflessness, humanity, loving kindness, whereas Mami Wata is very much about desire — physical desire and selffulfillment. Mami Wata seems to represent that cusp at which desire moves into a personal domain, but it also becomes quite an open domain, because, as you say, there's no judgment in it. The whole"good and bad" thing is interesting.William Blake said that traditionally, good is passive and evil is active — but that passive can also be evil, and active can be good. If you refrain from doing something — which Christianity in a way dictates — you don't necessarily do the right thing by doing nothing. But the idea of good and bad is also cultural — like the colonisers coming to South Africa and saying,"People are walking around naked!" It's like something you try and impose on someone else. I don't know if the work will be that obvious when you see it, but that's the background to it. It'll be a confusing saint — you won't be sure what it stands for.

Mami Wata often has a snake that kind of embraces her, and I think it sometimes spits out money; and then the Madonna has a snake too that she crushes. When you're working with these types of iconic images, you find them in so many cultures.And I see these things and wonder, was I just thinking of these things because I've seen them somewhere, or are they part of my subconscious? You understand these things at a very basic level — that's what I wanted to say with the sculpture.You have to feel her ... Your figure references a range of cults: she's African or Mexican or Western, or quite universal, but embodies all of those contradictions. Her identity turns out to be universal, but it's also, in a way, me — maybe not me, but someone white, I think, who has this kind of skirt, those shoes, whatever,These are the kinds of things that place her in a similar context to mine. To what extent does Watermeisie become your own representation? Or is it that she's part of a game of desire — she can be quite specifically autobiographical, but also a figure for what you might imagine yourself to be or in which you can experiment with different identities? With the Watermeisie or Mami Wata or the mermaid-type figure — I've had a lot of mermaid figures in my work before — I discovered that, like the dog in African art, which belongs to both the human world and the animal world and runs between the two,so the Watermeisie belongs to the fish/water world but is also a human being, so she's neither one nor the other.You know the tale of the mermaid who gives herself up to the land, and then can't belong? For me that's a nice metaphor for belonging,for trying to belong, but you are neither one nor the other. Like being European, but being born in Africa.[The artist] Brett Murray talked about it a lot when I was a student, about how he went to Europe the first time thinking that he would finally see where he came from.And he felt completely alienated, he didn't realize just how he doesn't belong there at all and how specifically you do belong to South Africa. And then again, you don't necessarily belong, or you hear that you don't belong. It feels 11:1 II I

CLAUDETTE SCHREUDERS WORKING ON THE FREE GIRL AT HER HOME IN JOHANNESBURG, JULY 2004

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the free girl Work in progress 2004

to me that was more of an issue a while back — just after the elections there was that question, who's really an African and who's not, and I suppose it's still there, but it's not discussed as much. So that's the nice thing about her and the cult figure. A woman from Unisa [the University of South Africa] told me about a guy who had a Watermeisie.You keep her in your house, in water, and you can feed her with blood or sperm. I don't know in what form she exists, whether she's a sculpture or a small animal, but it's obviously something magical — you hear the story and it's difficult to gauge what you should take seriously or how to understand it exactly. But you make a sacrifice to her so that you can get what you want — and he said that he wouldn't wear shoes, he would always be barefoot as a sign of his dedication.And he's not allowed to bring any women home, because she's there.You know,she's jealous. But he had a girlfriend and she was never allowed to come to his house, and she got really suspicious that he had a wife or something,so she came to the house and then she heard something in the bathroom, and when she opened the bathroom door a big snake came out and chased her out of the house. It's completely fascinating because it exists between truth and myth. Everything becomes so entangled, and in Mexico too, the spiritual is such a major part of the day-to-day. Their mythical narratives play themselves out in a social dimension. Our tour guide in Mexico told us about a saint-type figure, considered to be almost like a Jesus figure, who they called the Plumed Serpent, because he could be here and then a year later he could be seen right on the other side of Mexico,and so they thought that he traveled like a snake with wings.And the guy that told us this is like,"Well, you have to think, how did he get there?"

of theories about how they come to be everywhere — this kind of universal myth or universal knowledge. It's interesting that Adam and Eve come into your description of how the Madonna is often represented, squashing the snake — it seems to represent that point of choice around inhibiting desire or following it. With the Madonna there's almost a fear of what desire might lead to, so it has to be kept in place, under control, guarded against. I am thinking about your previous figures that have had religious connotations, and about the thought process that would have led to the Cathedral being the space to show this work — a Cathedral which is specifically about dogma that's largely been fractured into a far more open environment, that allows questioning ... I was thinking of this before the priest [Tom Miller of the Cathedral of St John the Divine] spoke. I was thinking of doing something that would be more open to whatever you want to believe, and there he was saying that. The alcove that you've chosen for your work in the Cathedral has a bronze dog in it. I'm thinking of your description of the dog as existing in some cultures between the human and animal worlds, which becomes a nice alliance. She's not going to be a mermaid though. Mami Wata sometimes is and sometimes isn't a mermaid,she can take many forms. She's from the water, that's why she's often a mermaid. But I'm not going to make a mermaid because I want her to stand.And she'll be high enough for one to look up to.

It's hard to figure out: the snake also spoke to Eve, and it's like that same mythical element in a Western religion; and like the mermaid:she's also from Europe and then she's also from Africa.And then you think, well, how can you think up something so outrageous in such completely different places? Like a woman with a fish tail and breasts ... And there are all kinds COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

the free girl (detail) Jacaranda wood, enamel paint 123 CM HIGH WORK IN PROGRESS PHOTO: JOHN HODGKISS

2004

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the free girl Jacaranda wood, enamel paint 123 CM HIGH WORK IN PROGRESS PHOTO: JOHN HODGKISS

2004

Are there any major differences between the Mami Wata and the Watermeisie that you've come across? Mostly just theories about where she comes from. One theory says that she was the figurehead, often a mermaid,on the bows of ships, and that's how she came to Africa from Europe. But Nigeria has a big Mami Wata cult, and apparently there are big fish in the Niger river that have breasts — a bit like seals, but they're whitish, and they're freshwater, I think. There's also a poster that came from Germany of a snake charmer with really frizzy hair, and a snake: it was about the exotic — this dark woman in Europe who was the snake charmer — and the poster somehow ended up in Africa, where it was absolutely mass-produced. It's all over West Africa, this specific image, and some people have suggested that this is perhaps where the idea of a woman and snake started. But you don't know what is true and what isn't.

your Mami Wata figure condone or encourage? Who is her target market? It's funny,just the idea that you can presume to make something that's religious — it's very arrogant. But it's again about asserting desire, it's about wishful thinking that's often repressed. I guess it's about the idea of either acting on something or repressing it. Mostly you assume that acting on something would be a bad thing, and I'm just wondering, it's just a question.And you don't know until that thing is acted upon, until the can is open, and then maybe it is a big mess. The figure seems to hint at encouraging personal risk to a certain degree, not risk in terms of physical implications, but the risk of being somebody who can ask for herself.

But it becomes part of that mythology ... I've also read that in a way the MamiWata symbolizes the West or Western women because she basically represents material goods and capitalism, consumerism, and she's often got straight hair, and she might be dark, but she can be white — she's sometimes thought of specifically as a white woman who flaunts material goods: that's her attraction. In that way she kind of symbolizes what colonialism seduced Africa with ... So there are all these arguments around what she is and where she comes from. I thought it was interesting being a white woman living in South Africa, and you know — there is this thing about a woman symbolizing material wealth, you'll get a trophy wife, you can show your wealth through this woman you have somehow acquired. It's kind of like this wild story that you have to rework ... You've described asking Nigerian artists about Mami Wata, while in that country on a residency in 1999, and them dismissing her as a superstition among less educated people. I'm curious that the idea exists on the moral periphery of society, that it would be sneered at as being naive and "tribal". That also becomes a point in your description of the Mexican saint who is accepting of peripheral status. What does

I think it's the risk of living a little bit. I guess it's part of being an artist — I watch more than I act. I'm more passive in a way. To what extent do your figures become a space of experimentation, a way of feeling out new things for yourself? I guess what I try not to do is to say this is the wrong or the right way. It's the idea that there isn't one truth.And that's why her religions are combined [in this piece]. It's confusing.The saint is confusing: you ask for something, you can want it, you can get it, and it can make you very unhappy. Or it can make you happy.There isn't really something to dictate this life in the end... I want to make something that is completely my own. I have to find my own version that is contemporary and mine and relevant to me. I didn't want to just copy something. It would somehow be meaningless. It would lose its power if it was just a copy. It had to have its own vital life story that it comes from. From my experience.

the free girl (detail) Jacaranda wood, enamel paint 123 CM HIGH WORK IN PROGRESS PHOTO: JOHN HODGKISS

2004

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heat II Hand-printed colour photographs 132 X 132 CM 2004

BERNI SEARLE Tracy Murinik The works that you are going to show at the Cathedral and Museum are part of the same body of work, Vapour. As I understand it you'll be showing the DVD of Vapour at the Cathedral and stills at the Museum? Berni Searle Technically, the works at the Museum are not stills.They are actually photographic images that were shot at a different time, at a different location using a medium format camera.The video and the photographs are related in terms of the subject matter, but they are quite different in the way that they have been generated and presented. The photographs have been combined, often repetitively, to evoke something quite different in some cases to the video. The visual impetus for the work was a newspaper photograph of a feeding project in Cape Town. Tell me about that image, and how you developed it into Vapour. I think the visual impact of seeing 100 huge pots over open fires, and the physical involvement of people in making this food on such a huge scale, were both things that sparked off associations for me. If I were to sum it up, it would be the "monumentality" of the event that first interested me. What was the original context in which the food was made? It's a feeding scheme that relies on contributions from the local Muslim community.The cooking of the food takes place close to Eid.The food is cooked mainly by volunteers throughout the night in huge pots over open fires and gets distributed to various parts of the Western Cape in the morning. So it is a huge undertaking that extends from one place to a wide range of people, regardless of their religious persuasions and, in some cases, even their economic circumstances. I also have personal recollections of food being cooked in huge pots in the backyard of my granny's house, which I was occasionally invited to for Eid. These pots were placed under gas burners while the men attended to the making of the food. I was

fascinated by the fact that they could make such huge quantities of food and still manage to have it taste so good! But more significantly, I think that such traditions and skills have been acquired and passed down in interesting ways, with various inflections and variations. My curiosity around this has informed some of my previous work as well, often referencing food and the way in which we prepare things. I'm quite interested in that aspect of why people do things the way they do. I think it is something we take for granted most of the time. But it comes from somewhere. Your re-enactment makes very specific changes to the scene. And in fact, although your video refers visually to a similar kind of scenario, it's a lot more ambiguous. There's a sense of it being an undefined situation, and there's something slightly ominous about the environment as well. Tell me about the changes you've made and their implications. For me it was not a matter of simply re-enacting a particular event.The work references the event, but detracts from it as well. For example,the food is replaced with water,so there is really no sustenance in terms of the usual associations with food. On the other hand, water is essential to our existence, but when it transforms itself into steam, a different set of associations begins to play itself out.Vapour has both the potential to cleanse and to scald, a kind of ambiguity that I wanted to bring out in the piece. So I was consciously shifting the associations of the actual event in the video.The work is removed further from the event by suggesting a human presence which was not directly engaged with the pots, except for the lifting of the lid.What I found compelling in the actual event was the way in which the gestures of individuals extended themselves to a wider or broader group of people â&#x20AC;&#x201D; I'm reluctant to use the word "community". In the work itself, the interactions between individuals are presented rather tenuously: there is a sense of estrangement rather than a connectedness.So the "potentiality" presented by the actual event is in fact lost in the work.

BERN! SEARLE WITH STEVEN COHEN IN NEW YORK. FEBRUARY 2004

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half light Lambda print 173 X 360 CM

2004

137 vapour (below left) Video stills Single DVD projection, shot on 516mm film DURATION 4 MIN 9 SEC

As you suggest, there's almost a sense of disillusionment in the way that people walk through the environment. It's also the first work you've done that only hints at your own bodily presence ... And includes other people. Whereas your previous work has always focused on you as an agent of your own representation. I'm still in control of the way in which I present or represent myself, although I must add that I know that I have very little control once it enters into the public terrain. But this piece is different in that it includes other people. I'd prefer to say that it suggests the presence of people, rather than representing particular individuals or myself. These figures wander through and negotiate their way through a "fuelled" landscape, which gradually transforms into an austere, quite surreal space.This "landscape" is revealed progressively,from a closeup and tightly cropped side view at first, to a more encompassing aerial view of what looks like or has become a devastated landscape.There is a sense that we're left with smouldering remains. But, perhaps in contrast to a sense of agency,there is also a sense of vulnerability in the way that the figures precariously navigate their way through the fires, which entails a certain amount of"exposure".

It's inevitable that the way in which the work is read changes in different contexts.An exhibition of mine which opened on September I I, 2001, in New York, is one example that I have previously referred to. The unpredictable dynamics of the relationship between a particular work, the context in which it is exhibited and its subsequent reception was surprisingly illustrated by the way in which images relating to my video, Snow White, were viewed. [The work shows Searle sitting, naked, with white flour falling onto her from above, collecting on her head and body.] These images took on a significance which was directly related to the experiences of people who were in New York on that day, and the days that followed. Entries into the visitors' book revealed that the flour used in this work was seen as ash, and that the act of dusting off the substance from my body became a significant act in terms of processing their own experiences. In terms of this upcoming show, having been able to visit the site meant that I could contemplate the potential relationship between the work and the site beforehand. One of the aspects that interested me about the site was that it was not a gallery or museum space in which artworks are usually exhibited, but a functional space which was used by a diverse range of people, in different ways and for various reasons.

It does look like the aftermath of some undefined event or catastrophe ... I think that the particular quality of the vapour adds to that. On a purely visual level, you are not sure what you're looking at â&#x20AC;&#x201D; it could be smoke or steam or layers of cloud, the ambiguity of which gives an ominous quality to the piece. But the movement and the whimsical quality of the vapour are also quite seductive. Does the meaning of the work change,for you, at the point that you choose to install it somewhere like a cathedral â&#x20AC;&#x201D; and of course this is a very specific cathedral?

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in light of I-IV Hand-printed colour photographs 100 X 121 CM 2004

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The Cathedral is non-denominational, and as such does not function to serve any particular institutionalized religious beliefs, drawing on both the local community and people further afield.The video that I chose to show in the Cathedral, Vapour, hints at potential connections, or lack thereof, between individuals.The floor plan or layout of the Cathedral is based on various pathways, crossings and intersections symbolic of various journeys, which is echoed in the video.There are also deposits of soot â&#x20AC;&#x201D; remnants of a fire that destroyed parts of the Cathedral a few years ago â&#x20AC;&#x201D; that give the space a particularly dark quality, which adds to the play of light and dark in the video.

That's where that initial image becomes the concept for potential. Your translation, your intervention into where that potential goes, is encompassed by a sense of ambiguity: that when you open those pots, there might well only be vapour. Lifting the lid offers a release from the pressure that is built up inside the pots. But the vapour dissipates easily, is hard to capture and remains elusive.

But then also to come to the broader context that could have an impact: it is a cathedral in the United States. On the one hand it is possible that the sense of devastation that is evoked in the video is something that people will relate to in terms of their own experiences. It's hard to tell. But on the other hand, and probably of more significance for me,is that the work could point to a sense of devastation on a global scale, in which groups of people have become highly polarized. Increased political tensions as a result of this polarization are one of the most troublesome aspects of the world in which we live, which requires that we question our position in relation to the conflicts that exist today. Coming back to where the piece was made, in South Africa, at a very particular point in time: yes, there's a context of worldwide tension, but the specific moment in which South Africa is now has a different status to pretty much anywhere else in the world. At the point of us celebrating ten years of democracy, and looking back over ten years, there's certainly celebration, but maybe also still a sense of disillusionment. Does your point about the interaction of the individual and the community have a particular significance in terms of the South African context? There are still many things that people are working through â&#x20AC;&#x201D; 2004 is certainly not a cut-off point. It could be an opportunity to consider what has been achieved in the past ten years, but it is also an opportunity to consider what still needs to be done. COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

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black hole Satin ribbon, wood and Perspex 180 CM DIAMETER

2003

DOREEN

SOUTHWOOD

Tracy Murinik What echoes through the works that you've chosen to present at the Cathedral and at the Museum is the sense of a very fragile line that can be crossed, or a very fragile structure that can potentially disintegrate, having things crumble or disappear. They suggest an inherent anxiety. To start with, can you tell me about the works at the Cathedral, Black Hole and The Swimmer? Doreen Southwood Both of these are existing works, products of a specific time in my life. Black Hole is made up of concentric circles, lines and lines of satin ribbon hand-stitched to form a circle moving from black to white. It's placed in a wooden frame-work and covered in Perspex, but the Perspex is concave, so it pushes down visually and literally in a threedimensional form,like a hole or a bucket.And looking into that, you see what is effectively a satin surface. I started out with the idea that ribbons are things that make little girls look pretty, and as soon as you are conditioned to thinking that way, you start this cycle, you know, where everything's included, everything good and everything bad ... It's a very simple work for me, it's very minimal in its content as well as its form. You've described it as potentially being a puddle or void ... It can be anything â&#x20AC;&#x201D; it can be the white or the black, it all depends on what you see, because they're both there.

I thought it would work very well with the existing lines and architecture of the Cathedral. Likewise with The Swimmer which is a little figure standing on the end of a diving board. I think it will be quite interesting to see that work in the context of this big, big, triple-volume space. How do these works relate to one another? They make sense visually, first of all.The blues and blacks and whites and the reflectiveness of the ribbons in Black Hole suggest water or a puddle, a type of landing field for this figure, something she might jump into.A black hole is something that is quite negative. It is an extreme expression. It's something that people don't understand, you know, books have been written on it, so this is a mind-boggling thing. That absorbs and consumes you? It's got no return, it's exactly like a bathtub drain. You never see the water again once you've let it out of the bath. And of course that's a feature on The Swimmer â&#x20AC;&#x201D; there's a drain inserted into her hip. The drain is usually where water flows out. Here, it's the opposite: if she dives into water she will be filled up with it ...

You suggested a very specific placement for it in the Cathedral: you describe wanting to have it "obscure the walkway" along the nave, leading towards the crossing area. I suggested that because walking towards the work, you will not be able to view inside it.Then getting there it will be quite a surprise to actually look at the detail inside. It's kind of like looking over a cliff, or a waterfall. I was just thinking of looking upwards in the Cathedral into what seems an infinity of space; there's almost an infinite line that Is drawn from there to the Black Hole ... COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

DOREEN SOUTHWOOD IN NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 2004

143 ribbon pillar Satin ribbon and wood 400 X 100 CM 2004

What are your thoughts around presenting these works in a cathedral? I've thought about religion being something incredibly black and white.And religion being about the afterlife. In both of these works there are hints of being lost, getting lost — not knowing what's going to happen if the swimmer,for example, had to take the plunge. There's definitely a relation there to spirituality and that which cannot be touched or seen, but only suggested. The position of your works in the Cathedral has changed, and they will now be installed in the Chapel of St Saviour. What kind of resonance do you imagine this new location will bring to these works? I think there are numerous associations between the works and the space: between water and baptism, diving board and cross, the figure poised at the end of a journey to a dark place. You're making two new works for the Museum ... I've bought 5 kilometres of ribbon! For four ribbon pillars?

"People want me to swim, but I know that I'm going to be filled up and drown. I can't swim anymore ..." But still I find myself with this little outfit on, at the end of a diving board, and I'm still standing there and reluctantly reconsidering.And it's the same with the pillar. It appears like it could be strong, but it's not. It's very much about being completely weak, very, very fragile; not something that's going to last forever, but is just there now. It's a very simple work — it's about one thought. Now I'm extending the idea, with one complete pillar and three more pillars around it, coming out of the wall — it's otherworldly. They've also got these little flowers .... that whole thing of making it pretty, making it nice to look at, making it easy to be around it. I like doing that with my work. I make it very easy for people to be around the work, because then it's easy to take in any disturbances in terms of content.You allow it in and then you kind of,"Ah ...", realize it to a greater extent, I think. A similar type of thing happens with the glass figure that you're making for the Museum. You describe her body as being sandblasted, but her wrists are highly polished, lit from behind to become transparent at these points. There's also a spiritual aspect here, magical, otherworldly — a world that can't be touched.

Yes.The work started with a single pillar made of satin ribbon.The surfaces of objects and of my works are very important to me because there's a lot of power in the visual, there's a lot of strength in something being specifically well-finished. It makes the work quite final. It's kind of like a school dress: "This is it, this is the standard and we like it, and now we're going with it, and the next 5 000 will be cut." The pillar is made of ribbons hanging from the ceiling to the floor.The shape is created by the density of the ribbons, and the reflective surface of the satin creates the illusion of a strong structure holding up the roof — but of course it's not holding up the roof, and anyone could walk through it if they wanted to ... I had been considering the idea of what I felt people were expecting of me the whole time. The Swimmer was actually the first work to deal with that. It was very much a way of saying,

ribbon pillar (detail) Satin ribbon and wood 400 X 100 CM 2004

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the swimmer (with black hole in background) Painted bronze 43 X 150 X 200 CM

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The wrists are very vulnerable parts of one's body ... Yes, they're where the pulse is, where you can feel the life inside you, which is emphasized by literally illuminating the figure, having light coming out of it. The figure will be naked, but the only naked part of the sculpture will actually be the wrists, because they'll be the only see-through part.The body will appear to be dressed because it's sandblasted and will look opaque and frosted. If there's a naked person who has just committed suicide lying in the bath, the last thing you see is the nudity, you just see the life ... So if you actually highlight the life, then you don't see the nudity, it's already covered. It's looking at the strength of these aspects as well. You use materials in a very specific way: things that are ordinarily solid, like a pillar, are made of a substance that's incredibly fragile, that can't hold itself up. The glass figure is frosted to look opaque, to look covered, but then there are very specific parts where you can see straight through her, where it's revealed what she's made of, which is incredibly fragile. The figure also refers to the crucifixion and Christ, which links to the Cathedral.The vulnerability of the wrists is associated with Christ and the crucifixion. It's not specifically a religious work, it's very much more about life, and also not understanding where it comes from, not understanding much about it at all. Like the pillars appearing to come out of the wall â&#x20AC;&#x201D; they don't respect the current state of our tangible world.

the swimmer (detail) Painted bronze 43 X 150 X 200 CM

2003

black hole (detail) Satin ribbon, wood and Perspex 180 CM DIAMETER

2003

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love's ballast Work in progress ARTIST'S STUDIO, CAPE TOWN

2004

CLIVE

VAN

Tracy Marian( To memorialize that which has largely been denied visual representation has been your major project for many years. You've spoken about presenting an "imaginary truth" relating to the history of men loving, creating a visual record of that which has been absent or relegated to the margins. In the process you've created a new (visual) language and vocabulary — an iconography of living and specifically of loving. You've often presented your work in unlikely public places, with a very deliberate intervention into spaces where that history would not necessarily have been recognized — on mine dumps (with their association of men working together), hillsides, legislature buildings — and of course in galleries and museums. The Cathedral of St John the Divine is a very specific spatial and ideological environment. How did this inform your initial proposal to make and install a massive carpet? Clive van den Berg Let's start with a description of the work, bearing in mind that this is a proposal rather than a realized work ... What 1 envisage is a very long carpet — 30 to 40m long.The material I'm thinking of is either some kind of cheap, thick blanket or industrial felt — the kind Joseph Beuys would have used, except I want it to be red and about 10cm high. Embedded in the carpet would be stones.At one end the carpet would be rolled to a height of about 2m — quite large, about human height — and then there would be about 30m of unrolled

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idea of a low thing, something that is literally rolled up and then rolled out. Obviously that talks about something detained,something heavy,and in its rolling out a kind of declaration — but very quietly, I don't want this to be a big declamatory work. Conceptually I was toying loosely with the idea of people in limbo, a kind of identity limbo — not necessarily as individuals, but in as much as our personal identity is echoed or ratified by social or political structures and buildings. I wanted to use things that everybody would be able to relate to — most people would know a stone as a memorial object, placed in a certain kind of way — and for them to be not entirely sure what we were memorializing,so that their conduit for empathy was kept open.So you couldn't have them say,"Fucking fags, we don't care if they die, they deserve to die", and move on. I'm working with materials and things which hopefully keep those conduits open, but which are not specific. So people don't know quite what they're relating to, but they know that there is something with which they are relating: not determined by imagery, not determined by iconography so much, but more by the materials and their articulation. If this was done sensitively, I think it would create a kind of opening, of feeling, which doesn't invite the approbation that labels usually encourage. In order to contend with a space of this scale, with such a strong visual tradition, do you need to find an alternative type of imagery to offset the broader ideology? I don't want to theorize my response too much. I mean, you go in there and you understand it literally

carpet.At one end there would be a structure with

through your skin: you walk about, you feel, you

lights on it, and,together with the stones, there would be apertures in the carpet — the flesh of the carpet, as it were — which are entry points,funnels, pores.

understand the quality of light — you're absorbed by ideology, through structure, quality of light, sound, or just by seeing who's in the Cathedral.All these things tell you what the place is about.And 1 actually have very positive feelings about that, and cathedrals generally.

How has the Cathedral influenced this? Well, in two ways: one was purely physical — how do you make a work in a space this huge and this high and this overwhelming and this laden with visual information and effect, and have that work seen? That determines the scale to an extent.The idea of a carpet seemed right.There are two options: you go for a high thing or a low thing ... a high thing's just not going to work, given time and logistics, so I went with the

These are places we can possess for our own purposes. First they are public institutions which serve multiple needs in the community.And I think they've been places of solace for gay people, or marginalized people,for all kinds of reasons for centuries, since they were built.They are places into which we project our own subjectivity.And the

CLIVE VAN DEN BERG AT THE CATHEDRAL OF ST JOHN THE DIVINE. FEBRUARY 2004

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love's ballast Sketch 2004

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love's ballast Detail of work in progress ARTIST'S STUDIO, CAPE TOWN

2004

architects of these places, particularly the mediaeval architects, consciously or otherwise created a language of spatial ambiguity which allows that. You look up into the crossing of a great mediaeval cathedral, at that darkness, and you do not know the limit.And that's the most wonderful characteristic of the place. In not knowing the limit, you are given license to project. So I think it's simplistic to say,"These are places which oppress and have oppressed homosexuals." I'm going to respond yes and no. I mean that's a very passive, simplistic superficial response to the morality of these spaces. It's certainly not how I respond.And in a sense that's an emblem for my approach.You look at a sermon,at a written text, and it might be oppressive, it might exclude you. But if your way of knowing the world is through space, light, structure, all the things which have ambiguity built into them, you're not going to find it oppressive. Even in the carpet, I'm using the language of that space — the inherent ceremony of unrolling the thing you walk down. I'm forcing a kind of narrative progression as you start at one end and proceed to the other.The way your body moves as you walk, stone after stone, builds on the language which I've already found in cathedrals. I love that language. In a sense, the very building of St John the Divine is proof of the success and usefulness of that language — consciousness of proportion, making the body look up into seemingly endless space,forcing the body to walk in a rhythmic and controlled way down an aisle, which induces a kind of reflective, internal awareness. 1 love that, and it's what I want my work to do:take the viewer not into a salvation of a religious kind, but to a different kind of consciousness. There's a visual connection between the way the carpet will be rolled out and the first work you proposed for the Museum: a giant, lightbulb-lit, outstretched arm, cut off at a point ... It intuits a sense of longing, reaching, a desire to hold, to possess.

own history of representation, but it's also not revealed — there's a sense of possibility around where it could stop or where it could go ... This is something I've been working with for years. It's a cliché to say that every act of love is also a knowledge of death, but for gay people — actually for anybody post-HIV, but particularly for gay men — every act of love is an act of honouring those who have died, literally, for their ability to make love.That's coupled with another perception that skin, which we used to think of as the protective interface between internal and external, is no longer that. I think of skin now as porous, and that interface as compromized and fragile. So I made the arm as this transparent thing which figures a tissue of structures which are incomplete and penetrated by emblems of memory — either stones or other parts of my vocabulary as a means of memorializing people who've died — and then lights, strings of lights, which go through the body. So we're continually honouring the memory, both exalting and being sad.And that ability to both mourn and celebrate is, I think, one of the contradictions of being post-HIV that we just have to deal with: they're not separate things anymore. Mourning is, for Edmund White,"the continual endless loss".And in Africa particularly we live in a time of endless loss. But at the same time finding ways of being, renegotiating the languages of love. How do we love without fear? How do we love in a way that honours loss? That has occupied my thoughts for almost a decade now. I'm thinking of the lightbulbs that run through the arm, and again the image of the red ceremonial carpet. The carpet also describes a type of flesh, but readable as a life force, a vein. You describe these works as both a celebration and a mourning, and in the use of lights there is an implicit flow of energy, a constant shift and exchange within the porousness of what you describe as skin.

And, of course, it's a relic. The carpet does similar things: it purports to be its own ceremonial stage with its

Yes, it's exactly that. I use light precisely because it can't be defined, using a combination of solid material, like wood or stone,and another material

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family tree Cement, wood, lightbulbs 330 X 54 X 51 CM

2003

that has no limit, whose condition is contingent upon where it's placed, the temperature around it ... All these things are part of your perception of the work.And it's the sense that you can't define where your perception of the work begins and ends that's important to me.There's got to be this interpenetration between the work and its public space. How did you envision the hand being installed in the Museum? The scale is enormous. I wanted a work in the Museum that literally pushed the limits of the space. Unlike the Cathedral, where the space is ambiguous, in the Museum you know the edge. Most of the artworks in the Museum will consciously, physically accept the proportions of the Museum as their determinant. I wanted a work that fought against those limits â&#x20AC;&#x201D; so I want the hand to literally push against the ceiling, as if it pushes beyond the polite space, the knowableness of that Museum space. It's going to be hot.That hand is going to generate a huge amount of heat. That adds a very tangible dimension to the work. Like a fever. How many lightbulbs do you think it will take? A few hundred.That's hot!The idea is how do you invert something like the fever of AIDS,the mark of AIDS.You have to invert its meaning and try and celebrate these marks,find a public acknowledgement of these marks ... It's something we face in South Africa all the time â&#x20AC;&#x201D; we can't mention the word, let alone the physical descriptions.The works do that in some kind of way. Much of my recent sculpture has worked with the idea of a swollen, inflamed gland, making that into a very beautiful thing, which is a celebration. It's this combination of simultaneous knowledge of fears and celebratory states that we have to find a language for, and that's my primary thrust.

time due to spatial and other constraints, and yet, as I understand it, the continuity of those initial ideas remains. What has changed fundamentally is the relationship to space.The first two works were considered very much in relation to the spaces that were proposed. The pieces that are going to be shown are much more ordinary and manageable in scale, and not as site-specific.The one for the Cathedral is site-related in that I'm making a figure which rests on a kind of sepulchre,as one would find in a church or a building which has a memorial function. On the top of it is a figure, with his arms half raised. He invokes memories of saints, but he's based on Saint Rocco, the saint of the plague. Saint Rocco is usually depicted lifting up his garment,exposing the mark of the plague. My figure is not going to have the mark of the plague, but he does have these huge glands.The idea is one of inversion, where you take the things which mark you as pariah or diseased or sick or beyond social or spiritual redemption, and you emphasize it to the point where it becomes a mark of beauty, as I've described previously. In linguistic terms what"nigger" or "faggot" has become in race and sexual politics. The other figure, at the Museum,is a variation on the Family Tree works of which there are many. It's a tall, thin work, and the idea is that this thinness literally goes to the ceiling with a sense that it's going to go beyond it.The upper part of the structure has thousands of tiny black wooden carved things attached: they're references to some sort of tabulation: they're counting, memorializing ... Again, the idea that contemporary acts of love are memorials at the same time. So it's that "family tree": the family of people who have made loving possible.

Your initial proposals as described in this interview were substantially altered over COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

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the calling Stills from two-channel video 2003

MINNETTE Tracy Murinik You've proposed two options of works for the Museum and one for the Cathedral, and I think it makes sense to speak about all three proposals because they're not dissimilar in what they deal with. Firstly you propose a spatial link between Johannesburg and New York as cities. What comes through strongly here is the idea of a specific vantage point: in The Calling, viewers get to see the city from an unusual perspective, as a vast panorama. We also get to see elements of it becoming almost mythologically enriched, but also incredibly malleable in terms of how they suggest specific cities, but also any city ... MinnetteVari The ideal city, a utopia: that idea is very particular to The Calling. So many mythologies that promise an impossibly perfect place also have an edge of exclusion, with only some eligible to be within its bounds, but this can also read as a trap for those within. I think, as an artist, whatever you do will always have that flavour of the outsider speaking.And I invariably find myself in that position — it's not something that one necessarily chooses or desires. It happens: that's the position art puts you in — you find yourself noticing the oddities, compelled to say the difficult things and not able to keep them inside. Finding yourself entangled in the woods of discourse — historical, personal, social — like the "bad sister" from the old fable, who, having been banished to the woods because of a curse, emits snakes and lizards whenever she speaks. In The Calling, you see this figure on the outskirts, on the rooftops of the proverbial concrete jungle. Filming up there where you find gargoyles and saints, symbols of might and myth,faith and superstition, benign and menacing at the same time and seemingly watching and observing in a kind of time-limbo, I had a definite sense of the predicament of simply being who you are.Any sense of identity is fragile, I think, and one is always up against so many constructs of class, allegiance, access, language. But the urge to balance on that ledge, petrified by the dizzying height and the abyss of all I don't understand about being South African — I don't exactly know what that says about me!

VARI been constructed using footage from both cities — as well as Brussels and one or two other places. What I've done is merge these so much that,together, they become a totally different place.They lose their respective identities and become a city that only exists as a construct, but a luminous one, which explains my use of the words,"0 lerusalem, aurea civitas,""Oh Jerusalem, radiant city," which, in this case, is also ironic.You know, because we hope so much,and the city is often the place where people feel themselves called, to go and make it big — whatever it is that you aspire to.As the home is an extension of the body, one can also think of a city as an extension of that humanity.And each city has that; it becomes a body all of its own. The Calling also has that religious kind of link — well, not necessarily religious, but spiritual — in my borrowing Hildegard von Bingen's words. She was such an incredible poet, and in such an unlikely time for a woman to be doing what she did. Of course, she also seemed like an outsider in that context,so that really struck a chord with me.As did the idea of the body as a living stone: a jewel in the wall of the shining city ... or Gothic cathedral! Well, actually the Cathedral of St John the Divine is built in the Gothic tradition, but it's not Gothic, nor can it be. And I love that idea too — because nothing is ever what it seems to be, and this Cathedral to me is a very wonderful metaphor for that.

The work was made at a time when I was traveling a lot between New York and Johannesburg, and has COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

MINNETTE VARI IN THE STONECARVING WORKSHOP OF THE CATHEDRAL OF ST JOHN THE DIVINE, NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 2004

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the calling Detail of still from two-channel video

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In its conception it tends to want to be a type of unifying utopia.

reinterpreting these and,in turn, presenting the result in relation to something concrete.

Such a large vision,and in a way it does achieve much of what it set out to do. But to walk into the space and have a guy in uniform announce,"Welcome to the biggest Gothic cathedral in the world!" is so American in the same instance that it becomes vulnerable also — a bit of a provocation, making me wonder,"what does Gothic mean, in this time and place?" and,"how do we read the symbols of this institution in a world where ideals and promises are multiple, ambivalent, even dubious?"

The characters that you choose to pick up on are very specific. We've spoken about the gargoyles which exist at the top of buildings, as in The Calling — they're overseers, they observe. But you've also mentioned using elements of the sphinx — mythical creatures, characters that traditionally hold secrets or test insight. I'm interested in how you're creating this newly "living" sculpture or incarnation of this history. What role do you play in that?

One of the proposals that you've made for the Museum picks up on the gargoyles again, and on those figures in relief on the façade of the Cathedral. You speak about the fact that you like to take pieces of sculpture or masonry and install them, creating a visual parallel. Wherever I show The Calling, I try to include in the installation what I call "found sculpture": pieces of architectural and other historical debris that have been preserved from structures that mostly no longer exist. Carefully chosen, such objects can inform the work, linking it into the local context. However,the Cathedral already so abounds with sculptural objects that I think to add more would be superfluous. Still, I would like to preserve that kind of dialogue,so I was thinking of finding objects in New York City that would take the discourse to another, maybe more personal level. I would incorporate these into a new installation at the Museum for African Art, using the liquid nature of video projection.The objects would not necessarily be gargoyles or even figurative, and could even be something I have cast or shaped myself. I often work with fragmented media footage — broken data streams from a broken world — so it would make sense to create a physical link to a city that, itself, has found itself broken and scattered, not too long ago. But the idea of reanimating something that has been carved in stone, to make it "alive" again, appeals to me.The image of "living stones" resonates with so many aspects of religious and political history and the state that the world is in right now.The video aspect would pick up on this, allowing me to use images and gestures from the world around me,

I think my role would be to use video to "bury" the questions within the stone, and then to choose the instances in which the stone divulges its secrets. There are these rather ambivalent angels that jut out of the front of the Cathedral:they appear beatific, even maternal, but at the same time there's something dark about them. I'm interested in the way that nothing is ever just good or just bad. I would like to look at the times we live in,find the same ambivalence in historical representation,for instance, and then invest these objects with some kind of character or presence. Inevitably, though, it will be my own sensibility, somewhat translated, since I will be choosing or devising the questions or riddles. But basically, to me,stone, like history, can be so mute, so precious about its secrets, and yet it says so much about where it comes from,that which created it. I spoke with one of the artists in the masonry workshop of the Cathedral (which is unfortunately not as productive as it once was) and it was absolutely fascinating to hear how, as she carves into the limestone,she uncovers little bits of shell or fossilized sea creature compressed in the ancient sea sediment. To me it takes the history of the Cathedral way back, even though the building itself isn't remotely that old. In archaeological terms, humans haven't been on the earth nearly as long as other humanoid creatures that walked the earth long before us, so you know, even on this scale our future is really in the balance.And I like to look at that big picture which is really so vast that it takes your breath away, and then go into the minutiae of just one mind and ask questions about the way in which we make sense of our existence. Because the questions we ask say a lot about us, and reveal a lot about being human.

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the calling Still from two-channel videoo 2003

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I'd like to pick up again on the idea of vantage point, and the alternative piece that you've proposed for the Museum, which uses the imagery of the rose window or mandala as its key form. You mention the mandala as a universal symbol, which in Sanskrit is also the eye, the lens. Can you tell me more about the piece? I was interested in the fact that the Cathedral uses that form. It draws you in from the outside towards the centre, where of course the light, or the Christ, or the solution, or the big promise lies — the aperture to enlightenment.And you find this form in almost every culture — the mandala as a lens that focuses mind and spirit towards that special insight, a gift of light. In the context of my work I can equate its hypnotic quality with that of television — another, more mundane and contaminated/contaminating kind of lens that offers focus of a different kind, always with a certain bias, a certain perception, a message being broadcast to people saying,"This is who we are, this is what is going down, what the future holds, what has happened and may still come." The light and colour hold us spellbound, but it is the dark stone formation of the tracery that gives the rose window its structure — that holds it in place and provides its momentum and rhythm. And this made me wonder about the possibilities of exposing the structure-providing network of gestures — verbal and visual — that enables us to make sense of global communication and the language of broadcasting. I would like to create a lexicon of gestures, based on what I see in the media and using my own movements in silhouette to create the tracery for a new mandala or rose window.The result could be a very sinister disc that does not necessarily promise serenity. Its tracery will be alive, organic,constantly changing, but still quite symmetrical — or on two axes anyway.To me this is important because it appeals to the human sense of pattern, but at the same time it remarks on our age in which things are repeated and mirrored. In this context my body becomes a kind of recording device through which I can interpret gestures that we have come to recognize so well.

Gestures of people caught up in brutal and uncertain times, like we see every day on the evening news. Arms held up in protest, bodies in disarray as crowds scatter at the sites of explosions,gestures of defiance, of prayer, even of greeting. But it is also worth noticing how such gestures can sometimes be found in very old representations of human history, even in countless stone sculptures.And this may be a key for me to want to merge all these thoughts into one work. All through the 20th century there has been the perception that the world is going faster and faster. But I think something significant has changed since 2001, or 9/1 I, in that the world has become much more volatile, or at least conscious of its own volatility and duplicity.A lot of what we are can be captured in the gestures we make — not only bodily ones, but also cultural or ideological ones:a written manifesto or even a piece of architecture — the Cathedral,for instance, is a gesture in and of itself ... Where the promise of utopia collapses is that it is not possible to ever create or even represent the big picture in full, and in fact, there might not even be such a thing.While we still cannot even agree whether your blue is the same as my blue ... to me it is always remarkable that people attempt over and over again to capture something that is "the truth". Yet, I'm afraid that this is what I'm always grappling with. It's a fierce angel to wrestle, and ever elusive.

What kinds of gestures? COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

MINNETTE VARI WITH STEVEN COHEN AND SANDILE ZULU, TRAVELLING VIA SUBWAY TO THE MUSEUM FOR AFRICAN ART, NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 2004

158 DIANE VICTOR WITH PREPARATORY SKETCH FOR ALTARPIECE WITH ALTERED EGOS: JESUS AND JOHN. JULY 2004 PHOTO: JOHN HODGKISS

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DIANE VICTOR Tracy Marian( As an artist you've described yourself as an impersonator, using the image of your body to play various roles, often undermining convention and stereotypes, and bringing attention to attributions that are often given specifically to women.The works you've proposed for the Cathedral pick up on traditionally attributed roles within that context, whereas the triptych you've proposed for the Museum appears to look at issues of access according to a hierarchy of attributions. It's an intricate line of thought that you've developed between the two spaces. Diane Victor The Museum piece looks at the very traditional roles of the Marys according to the various stages of her life, as well as looking at the martyr and donor/giver in religious figures. For the Cathedral these ideas are taken up in a more irreverent way, and are more challenging in that they have very specific roles, very specific body positions, which relate to a lot of the work I've done previously. I've always used my own body in my work: I've used it intuitively because it was the only body I had to draw from.The work for the Cathedral will push some of the limits [of Mary's representation] a lot further — it could be the immaculate conception,or it could be Mary in ecstasy. I'm looking at roles that females have been allocated within Christianity ... At a broader level, I'm looking at the roles imposed on them and playing around with them.The aim is not to go in and offend straight down the line, but obviously to try and get people to think a little bit more about what you're displaying.The proposal for the Museum work reflects a different headspace. Again, I'm looking at very traditionally defined roles, and also at the fetishizing of these kinds of images. I think your point about fetishized iconography is an important one, because you pick up on the difference between, firstly, the fact that iconic images of women occur very rarely within the Cathedral ...

And they're predominantly either Mary or a martyr of sorts who is supposed to be teaching some kind of didactic lesson around how to behave as a woman. Can you describe the space that you originally chose in the Cathedral and how the women relate to the male figures that occur in that particular chapel? I chose the chapel of St Ansgar because it was an intimate space. I found the Cathedral itself exceptionally daunting — I felt it was almost not possible to try and produce a drawing to put into a space like that: kind of like throwing rocks at the moon.The chapel is just more approachable.What I also liked about it is that it's fairly traditional: you have that large stone reredos in the centre of the altar, with six male figures standing there in their imposing little stone formats,And directly above them,there are stained glass male figures that stand there as well,And you have these wonderful open spaces, just waiting for a woman to pitch up and say "hello".And I'm intending to make drawings that are very alive, that are certainly playing the roles of the formal poses, but they shift their body language just slightly — they question, not necessarily ridicule, but set up the whole kind of facade: the artificiality of these little stone figures and these little glass figures above them. Initially I selected the space because it was a size I related to personally — it was kind of life-size, you could almost climb in and sit there yourself.That was the initial thing: a space that I could fit into in a Cathedral I felt dwarfed by.And then, because one works in stages, it was, okay, I need to work with myself in relation to the performance of identity, so we can't bring just any female character into this, it's going to be too arbitrary. But certainly Mary is allowed in? And she has this life story — the stages of life set out on a very formal basis. I can just reinvent them, re-explore them through my own life story, through the definitions of her life, my life, and then just sit up there in prize position.

And when they do they're specifically niched ...

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learning posture, practising pose (Left-hand panel of diptych) Etching, embossing and mezzotint 197.5 X 99.5 CM

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You've proposed to use coloured pastels to make these drawings.You said that you'd pick up on the colours of the walls in the background. I found that interesting because the predominant colour that combats the neutral is in the stained glass ... Very jewel-like, artificial. It also obscures the images themselves. They become a decorative pattern. I'm interested in your decision to physically fill these open spaces with women,rather than raising questions around who was supposed to have been in those gaps — could it have been a possibility that they were supposed to have been for women? And also bringing colour into that space which gives them probably more of a sense of physicality even than the male figures around them ... It obviously wouldn't be bright colour — it would be naturalistic, a lot of flesh and wounds,simple clothing, so that they are very real and alive, with their gritty kind of earthiness of,"Yes we're women and we're here.And look at the guys, they're cast in stone like they're meant to be,and dead boring, and they don't give anything." I mean, people tend to look at those stone carvings as almost a decorative surface — there's no intimate contact with any of those characters — they're "symbols of" ... Mary is seen as "a symbol of" ... In this case, on one level she'll be a symbol; on another she's a real person — she's someone who looks at you and makes some kind of eye contact. I'll work out where the viewers are going to be so that she makes eye contact and looks directly at all of them: either to look or avoid or seduce or whatever.So you get very seriously looked back at by these women. On a formal level as well, the colour was to call attention to them,to the fact that they don't belong; not to try and emulate — because initially I thought I could do them in a type of stone colouring and make them look like stone carving. But I thought,"No,they're not copying, following form:they're six Marys,and it's about time she got a chance to ..."

As you say, this heightens the fact that the male figures become dead stone replicas of themselves. But what also happens is that they seem to be trapped in their own roles — a type of reversal around their potential to exist in any other space. I find the way you've played with that point of access very interesting in relation to the work you've proposed for the Museum. I suppose, again, I'm putting women into roles which are normally male-based, and possibly also asking whether it's only through being a woman that you can really experiment.As a male figure, like St Sebastian, you are formally condemned to standing looking vaguely erotic, with seven arrows piercing you in appropriate points.Whereas if you convert this into a female figure, is there a second life that you can give that character? With a role-playing, masquerading woman as St Sebastian, you can actually do so much more. Do you give that original character, St Sebastian, a chance to really express himself? Or is it only through being a female figure that it has the chance to have a second life? It goes for your martyr, your central godhead figure and your donor, the person who gives. By converting them into female roles they can have this other life. One still can't break that very formal convention of what they represent, but through the female, yes,they're allowed to subvert.

DIANE VICTOR IN HER STUDIO IN PRETORIA, JULY 2004 PHOTO: JOHN HODGKISS

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learning posture, practising pose (Right-hand panel of diptych) Etching, embossing and mezzotint 197.5 X 99.5 CM 2004

At the same time the Museum piece needed to be a lot more formal.The medium itself— shifting between pastel, which is a lot freer, and etching, which, once you've cut the shape of that plate, is an incredibly formal medium,an incredibly daunting medium from a technical point of view, especially using plates that size. It's like etching in stone: once that plate is cut, that's it. So you're going back to a more traditional form.The paper will be deeply embossed for the niches that they're set into, so they kind of frame them.They're forced into these little roles that go back to the forced, imposed roleplay, but just subverting it. You've thought through the implications of what the materials have to add to that process, specifically in terms of the type of paper you plan to use for the embossing. You described it as "badly damaged" paper. That comes from another aspect of the work I've been doing for the last year or so.The idea of working with what embossing does to paper —"damage" not so much in the traditional sense of torn and mangled, but altered:forced into positions that it wasn't designed for. It's about this imposed role. I'm also very interested — I suppose on a very superficial level — in the idea of using that white enforcement, white framing — pressed ceilings, things like that; things that are decorative — it's all meant to be frilly and decorative and pretty and quite light-hearted. It's like the doily [decorative cloth] on the table — it carries this weight of tradition, this light, white, fragile thing that is so rigid and so difficult to break and so powerful from its traditional point of view, and yet so frail.

that paper almost to breaking point with these subtle white patterns. Was that part of your thought process when you started working with embossing? So much of what I do works backwards.This reverse process of diluting it, distilling it, and then at the end of the work it's like,"Okay,so that's what I was doing", but not consciously.A lot of what I do is about pushing limits, formally. How has the show's context influenced your thinking? The type of people who are going to come to the Cathedral are going to be in perhaps two or three categories: the religious person who comes into that space for whatever purpose, and there's obviously also a very high tourist turnover in a place like that — and there's a little bit of a surprise element with people coming in who are going to expect to see a Cathedral, and that's the thing I look forward to. Whereas in the Museum people come prepared, they're expecting X; very often you've already had a kind of selection process — those people who are going to get on a train, go all the way out to Queens, are coming prepared for something, they've got certain expectations. Both projects deal with trying to alter people's expectations. For a tourist coming into a Cathedral, they're expecting to see religious figures, and they want to see fine carving, and they want to be awed by the grandeurAnd I like the idea of surprising them.You've got an audience that's not in any way prepared for what you're going to give them.

That infers an ideological tradition as well. Yes, it's about forcing something that's got a natural life of its own into a mould. I am experimenting with how deep an embossing I can put on paper before it tears.You can literally push this paper to extreme levels of shaping before the fibres start tearing.Again it's using something that's just white — there's nothing there. But it's extreme stress: it's actually pushing

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SANDILE ZULU Tracy Murinik Process is always a central part of what you do: you use the elements of fire, water, air and sometimes earth to make your work. Can you describe your working process? Sandile Zulu What a lot of people don't know is that I use water on the surface, in the same way that I use fire. People might think that I soften the canvas with water so that the fire does not burn that area, but that's not the way I use water. I use water to clean my hands, to wash my hands, like a ritual. I use the water to sprinkle in the air, not directly onto the surface on which I'm working. I don't wet the canvas. I use water maybe to sprinkle around the area where I'm working. It's a ritual kind of exercise. And I use different degrees of flowing air to affect the flame that I use. Maybe I'd need a very strong wind, so I would burn a tuft of grass, like the type that is used for thatching the roof, and I would wield it in the air so that the flame burns very quickly. Do you work outside?

How did you do that? I was using wind to blow the flame. In a poetic sense, I was using fire as a social reference as well. It was all encompassing. I was using it not just for myself, but within a social perspective. I was using [fire] even for those who were not using it. So, in a way, I saw myself as being in the frontline,"fighting fire with fire".There were also other symbolic references within the fire, because fire heals,fire warms us, because fire is a social thing in a sense: it brings us together.And it was important for the fire to bring us together at that point in time so that we could be together in struggle — in the fight for liberation. And so fire was both a social and a psychological kind of thing. Revolution for me was not about destruction: it was about transformation.We need fire because without fire we are dead.You need fire to keep you going, to keep you strong,to keep your visions alive. Fire is that which burns within us all the time, and if we lose that heat, then we're dead — you don't have fire in you to propel yourself forward.

Well, it depends on the material that I'm using. For canvas I don't always need to be outside, but for other effects I would want to be outside.That's often a problem because I do not have an open space where I can work. How and when did you decide to start experimenting with fire as part of your technical process? I began using fire in 1990 at a time when the political situation in South Africa was very violent.The concept was that it was a revolutionary suggestion: I was using fire in a way that was "fighting fire with fire". The state was using fire, guns ... there were fires around the country; people were burning things and people were thinking that was part of the revolutionary act. So for me it was a revolutionary suggestion. I was, in fact, advocating it — that it was the right thing to do, because it has to do with radical transformation: the concept of radical transformation of the revolution. I think this is what I was saying in a way. But I think, thereafter, there was growth in my work,and I started to consider the air and "the winds of change", and I started incorporating the actual wind into my work. COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

SANOILE ZULU IN JOHANNESBURG, JULY 2004

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SANDILE ZULU IN HIS STUDIO IN JOHANNESBURG WITH THE LABYRINTH OF GENES AND ELEMENTS IV

In the same vein I began to use water, and I began to use soil, because these elements have healing substances within them. Using earth was also a reference to my belonging, a reference to land, as well as a reference to healing, and to ownership. And the reference to land was also a reference to dispossession, and to the desire to reclaim land. And that's the same reason I use water, because these are things that belong to the earth. If you possess the earth, you possess the water that runs within it. The water that you need to survive to live ... So it was in a way about possession, and dispossession,and belonging to the land. Like identity. And at the same time it's cleansing, of course.And fire is also used for immolation ... Those are the themes that 1 reference in my work. The air is very important because we breathe it: it's about life. It's also about experience and existence. So these elements,to me, provide an entry point for dealing with social issues, political issues, economic issues, spiritual issues ... You don't see the air, you don't see, perhaps, the lumps of soil in my work, but like I use the water to sprinkle, I use dust as well in the process of creating a barrier for the fire. I use only a small amount of dust which gets blown away by the wind, so you cannot trace it on the surfaces on which I'm working. But I'll use it in that context. Birth, death, rebirth ... I think the concept,the idea, resides in all the four elements.

Tell me about the work you're making for this exhibition. My work is relevant to the concepts of the project, which is about how South African artists position themselves in various ways after a decade of democracy. I will be dealing with these kinds of psychological relations, but using the idea of the brain as the seat of complexity. I have not concluded how the work is going to look, but the idea is that it will deal with a very specific area of the body, which is the mind. I'll use the brain imagery as a metaphor for an entry point into those issues. I like the idea of using the brain — I'm very interested in the convoluted form of the brain, which is not only about the brain but also shows a type of connection in terms of the parts of the body.That kind of imagery, the convoluted,complex form of the twisted and overlapping brain matter — you can also see and trace that in another part of the body,the intestines. To me that is very interesting because it's really dealing with the whole body — they echo one another in form. It's very interesting to consider the mind as the seat of complexity: of the intellect, and how these affect both the genotype and, in turn, the physical body and the behaviour and consciousness of human beings. It's like a scientific kind of study for me in some ways. It's a different angle from perhaps having to use symbolism that I've found people often misunderstand.

Remember the "wind of change" that blows.This is what I wanted to talk about in my work.And actually when I began conceptualizing using all these different elements of life, it was with the idea of radical change, radical transformation. Because fire could symbolize that.And yes, of course,there was poetry that I was thinking of, and there was a stage when I wrote a lot of poetry ... And poetry is light: as in knowledge, as in knowing.And fire is light, but also revolution: psychological, spiritual revolution. I viewed these natural elements as being appropriate in the way that I wanted to communicate my visions. I still think that the elements that I'm using are relevant to the context globally and locally, as it was when I started using them. Because I think that the issues haven't really changed,and that the processes I use to make my work are still relevant today.

I 69

the labyrinth of genes and elements Ill Fire. water, earth, air and stones on canvas (detail) 273X 163 CM

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There's also a metaphorical parallel in this echo of the physical structure of the brain and the intestines. Because one might describe the intestines as the zone of translation: if you feed your body with food,food is translated into its nutrients and its waste within the intestines. And then your description of the brain as the "seat of complexity", which has physiological and psychological implications, identifies the brain as the point of decision-making. You also say that to create this work you will use the various elements. To take the metaphor a bit further, the brain has the scientific capacity to manipulate any of those elements that you use, to constantly redefine their meanings. It's a way of trying to push my discourse.

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ARTISTS' BIOGRAPHIES

Jane Alexander was born in Johannesburg in 1959. Winner of several prestigious awards including the 2002 DaimlerChrysler Award for South African Sculpture, the FNB Vita Art Now Award in 1996 and the Standard Bank Young Artist Award in 1995,she is acclaimed for her haunting observations on humanity in the form of sculptural installations and photomontages. Solo shows include Jane Alexander:African Adventure and other works which toured Germany and South Africa (2002-3);Jane Alexander at Gasworks, London (2000); and "Born Boys" and "Lucky Girls" at the UCT Irma Stern Museum,Cape Town (1999). Recent group exhibitions include Africa Remix at the Kunst Palast, Dusseldorf,and other venues (2004-6); The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945-1994 at Museum Villa Stuck, Munich,and other venues (2001); Fault Lines at the Castle of Good Hope,Cape Town (1996); and ldentita e Alterita at the Venice Biennale(1995). Born in Pretoria in 1974, Wim Botha lives in Johannesburg. He was the joint winner of the inaugural Tollman Award for Visual Arts in 2003 and the recipient of an Ampersand Foundation residency in New York in 2002. Hs work unravels assumptions about the loaded visual symbols and icons that permeate our lives. His solo exhibitions include Speculum at Michael Stevenson Contemporary, Cape Town (2003); commune: onomatopoeia as featured artist at the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival (2003) and commune:suspension of disbelief at the Klein Karoo Festival (2001). Group exhibitions include Africa Remix at Museum Kunst Palast, Dijsseldorf, and other venues (2004-6); Clean at the Millennium Gallery,Johannesburg (2001) and Grime at Bell-Roberts Gallery, Cape Town (2002); and Transmigrations: Rituals and Items at the Artshare Warehouse, Los Angeles and Tijuana Cultural Center, Mexico (1999). Performance artist Steven Cohen was born in 1962 in Johannesburg. He currently lives in La Rochelle, France, where he works with the Ballet Atlantique/Regine Chopinot. Cohen identifies specific sites for his interventions â&#x20AC;&#x201D; a voting station, a rugby stadium, a squatter camp,a right-wing gathering â&#x20AC;&#x201D; where he confronts discrimination, injustice and hypocrisy on a range of levels. Recent solo exhibitions/performances include This one got away at the Mohni Performance Festival, Viinistu, Estonia (2003); Chandelier, a performance at the demolition of an informal settlement, Newtown, Johannesburg (2002); Limping into the African Renaissance, FNB Vita Dance Umbrella,Johannesburg (2000); Nobody loves a fairy when she's forty at the Goodman Gallery,Johannesburg (1999); and Crawling to register, COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

Johannesburg (1999). Group exhibitions include Scatalogue:30 years of crap in contemporary art at the SAW Gallery, Ottawa, Canada (2003), and Distinguished Identities at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, New York (2000). Churchill Madikida was born in Butterworth, in the Eastern Cape,in 1973. He lives and works in Johannesburg. He uses video, photography and live performances to provoke debates around issues of personal and cultural self-representation, often focusing on Xhosa initiation rituals. He was joint winner (with Wim Botha) of the inaugural Tollman Award for Visual Art in 2003, and currently works as Collections Curator at Constitution Hill,Johannesburg. His solo exhibitions include Interminable Limbo at Michael Stevenson Contemporary (2004) and Liminal States at Johannesburg Art Gallery (2003). He has participated in group exhibitions including Rest in Space at the Bethanien, Berlin (2003); Ubuntu at the Musee des Arts d'Afrique et d'Oceanie, Paris (2002); Passage ofTime at the Sandton Civic Gallery, Johannesburg (2002); and New Signatures at Pretoria Art Museum (2001). Currently living in Durban,Thando Mama originally hails from Butterworth in the Eastern Cape, where he was born in 1977. Mama was awarded the Prix de la Communite Francaise de Belgique at the 2004 Dak'Art Biennale, and in 2003 won the MTN New Contemporaries award, based in Johannesburg. His mostly digital video works explore issues pertaining to black masculinity and representation. He held a solo exhibition, Back to Me, at the NSA Gallery in Durban in 2003, and has participated in group exhibitions including Thwasa at the NSA Gallery (2003); Homing In at the National Arts Festival, Grahamstown (2003); Outpost 11 at the US Art Gallery, Stellensbosch (2002); CityScapes at Durban Art Gallery (2002); and the Thupelo International Artists' Workshop at the South African National Gallery Annex, Cape Town (2001). The most recent recipient of the Tollman Award for Visual Art, Mustafa Maluka was born in 1976 in Cape Town. He is a PhD Candidate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam, having completed his MFA at De Ateliers in Amsterdam. He is the technology and digital culture editor for Africanhiphop.com,Africa's largest urban youth website, and has published widely on digital culture and urban African youth culture. Solo exhibitions include Bad for Your Health/Wrong Colour on the Virtual Museum of Contemporary African Art, www.vmcaa.com/maluka

Ill

(2002); The Realness at Galerie Tanya Rumpff, Haarlem, The Netherlands (2002); Hard Living (an ethnomethodological approach) at De Ateliers,Amsterdam (2001); Maluka 2000 at De Twee Wezen,Enkhuizen,The Netherlands (2000); and The (Unstoppable) Rapist at the Association for Visual Arts, Cape Town (1998). Group exhibitions include X-ibition at the Steven Lawrence Gallery, London (2004);[ROJIT] 2004 â&#x20AC;&#x201D;>XP,an international travelling exhibition (2004); Guess Who at the Stedelijk Museum,Zwolle, Netherlands (2003); and Portrait Africa at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2000). Born in Shanzha,Venda, in 1938,Samson Mudzunga lives and works in Mphephu, Limpopo (formerly Venda). His work combines sculptural components,including drums, with performance,and actively challenges the hierarchical codes and power structures of traditional Venda society. His solo exhibitions and performances have taken place in his rural home village in Limpopo, as well as in art galleries and museums.These include Suka Dzivha Fundudzi at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (2003); Hayoni/Crossings at the NSA Gallery, Durban (2000); Performance at Lake Fundudzi,Venda (1996); and First Funeral Event in Dopeni,Venda (1996). Group exhibitions include Siyowelo: Love, Loss and Liberation in South African Art at the Gas Hall, Birmingham City Museums and Art Gallery, Birmingham,and Gertrude Posel Gallery, University of the Witwatersrand,Johannesburg (1995-6), and For North on the first Johannesburg Biennale (1995). Choreographer and director Jay Pather was born in 1959 in Durban.A Fulbright Scholar and MA graduate of New York University, Pather has been director of Siwela Sonke Company since 1996. He is interested in staging dance performances combined with mixed media installations in sites ranging from hotel rooms to public spaces. Recent works include CityScapes in Johannesburg and Durban,Home (commissioned for the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown), NightScapes, State of Grace, A South African Siddhartha and most recently Republic, for the Jomba! Contemporary Dance Festival. Abroad, he has created work for the Interface Festival in London, the Sanga 11 Festival of African choreographers in Madagascar, the World Social Forum in India, the Festival of Dhow Countries in Zanzibar and the ITs Festival in Amsterdam. Born in Soweto.Johannesburg, in 1966, Johannes Phokela now lives and works in London.A graduate of the Royal College of Art (1993), he uses historical

references and iconic imagery of classical Western art and toys with the "myths placed upon their aesthetic values as the epitome of cultural perfection". His solo exhibitions have included The Age of Enlightenment at Gallery Momo,Johannesburg (2003);The Gallery, CafĂŠ Gallery Projects, London (2002); Fixations at Art Exchange Gallery, Nottingham (2000); and the Rack Gallery, London (1998). Group exhibitions have included Unpacking Europe for Rotterdam Cultural Capital of Europe (2001); Routes:Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's idols at the Brunei Gallery, School of Oriental and Asian Studies, London (1999); and Graft on the second Johannesburg Biennale, South African National Gallery, Cape Town (1997). Robin Rhode was born in 1976 in Cape Town and lives in Berlin. He frequently combines performance art and drawing, taking the former to the streets and producing the latter live in the art gallery.Solo exhibitions have included The Score at the Artists Space, New York (2004); The Animators at the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Boston (2004); a Fresh residency at the South African National Gallery, Cape Town (2000); and Living in Public at the Market Theatre Gallery,Johannesburg (1999). Recent group exhibitions have included Tremor at the Palais des Beaux Arts, Charleroi, Belgium (2004); How would you light heaven? at Carlier Gebauer, Berlin (2004); Things you don't know 2 at the Home Gallery, Prague, Czech Republic (2004); Schizorama at the National Centre for Contemporary Art, Russian Federation, Moscow (2004); Dessins et des Autres, Galerie Anne de Villepoix, France (2004); and How Latitudes Become Forms at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2003). Claudette Schreuders was born in 1973 in Pretoria and lives in Cape Town. She is known for her carved and painted wooden figures that draw inspiration from West African Colon (colonial) sculptures, as well as narrative drawings and prints. Solo exhibitions have included The Long Day at the ASU Art Museum,Phoenix (2004); Six Stories at the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival, Oudtshoorn (2002); and Crying in Public (2003) and Burnt by the Sun (2001) at the Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. She has also shown extensively on group exhibitions, including Coexistence: Contemporary Cultural Production in South Africa at the Rose Art Museum,Boston (2003); Group Portrait South Africa: Nine Family Histories at the Tropenmuseum,Amsterdam (2002);and Liberated Voices: Contemporary Art from South Africa (1999) at the Museum for African Art, New York. COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

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Berni Searle was born in 1964 in Cape Town. Best known for producing digital video and lens-based media installations, her work references ongoing explorations around issues of self-representation, personal and collective identity. She was shortlisted for the international Artes Mundi award in 2004,and was presented with the prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist Award in 2003;the resulting solo exhibition, Float, toured South Africa until 2004. Other solo exhibitions have included Vapour at Michael Stevenson Contemporary,Cape Town (2004); and A Matter ofTime at the UC Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley (2003). Recent group exhibitions have included Hang In There, My Dear Geum-Sun, Busan Biennale at the Busan Metropolitan Art Museum,Seoul (2004); Min(e)dfields at the Kunsthaus Basel-land, Basel (2004); and Through the Looking Glass at the National Arts Festival, Grahamstown (2004). She will participate in the 5th Shanghai Biennale at the Shanghai Art Museum in China later in 2004. Doreen Southwood was born in 1974 in Cape Town. Employing various media to produce sculptures and installations, she often references "feminine" or "domestic" materials and activities such as needlework. She was the overall winner of the inaugural Brett Kebble Art Awards in 2003. She has held solo exhibitions at the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival, Oudtshoorn (2003) and at Bell-Roberts Gallery, Cape Town,in 2001 and 2002. She was selected for the international exhibition at Dak'Art 2004,the Dakar Biennale in Senegal. Other group exhibitions include Homeport: Five Port Cities at the V&A Waterfront, Cape Town (2001); and Celebrating Difference at the Granary, Cape Town (2000). Born in Kitwe, Zambia in 1956. Clive van den Berg lives and works in Johannesburg and Cape Town. Using a range of media, his work often engages the public sphere, with projects including massive fire drawings on sites such as mine dumps in Johannesburg and District Six in Cape Town. In 2002 he was commissioned to make artworks for the new Northern Cape Legislature buildings in Kimberley. He is currently curator of the Brett Kebble Art Awards and of Heritage Buildings at the Constitution Hill precinct in Johannesburg. He has held numerous solo exhibitions at the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, including Love's Ballast in 2003. Recent group exhibitions include Tremor at the Palais des Beaux Arts. Charleroi, Belgium (2004); Video Formes, International Video Festival, Clermont Ferrand, France (2002); Videobrasil, Sao Paulo, Brazil (2000); and Microwave at the Hong Kong City Exhibition Hall, Hong Kong (1999). COPYRIGHT PROTECTED

Minnette Vani was born in 1968 in Pretoria and lives in Johannesburg. She works predominantly with digital media and large-scale projections, often including performance elements by inserting her body into reworked media and historical documentary footage. Her work has been thematically linked to exhibitions and conferences exploring identity, transition, politics, mythology,trauma and history. Most recently she held a solo exhibition at Art Museum Lucerne (2004). Other solo shows include Chimera (black edition) with Galerie Renee Ziegler at Art Unlimited, Basel (2003); Serge Ziegler Galerie, Zurich (2002); and Aurora Australis at the Standard Bank Gallery,Johannesburg (2001). Recent group shows include New Identities: Contemporary South African Art at the Museum Bochum, Germany (2004); the First Seville International Biennial of Contemporary Art (2004); Transferts at the Palais des BeauxArts, Brussels (2003); and Banquet at the Centre of Contemporary Art Palau de laVirreina, Barcelona (2003). Her work was also presented on Plateau of Humankind at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001. An acclaimed printmaker, Diane Victor was born in Witbank in 1964 and lives in Halfway House, near Johannesburg. She exhibited recent work at Michael Stevenson Contemporary,Cape Town,in 2004,and holds regular solo shows at the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg. Group exhibitions include Triad, Chamaliers, Paris (2003); Contact Zones: Colonial and Contemporary at Michael Stevenson Contemporary,Cape Town (2003); Clean/Grime at the annual Klein Karoo National Arts Festival, Oudtshoorn (2003); Show Me Home at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (2003); and Female Printmakers at the Museum St Niclaus, Belgium (1996).Victor was a recipient of an Ampersand Foundation residency in New York in 1999. Born in 1962 in Ixopo, KwaZulu-Natal, Sandile Zulu studied art at the historic Rorke's Drift Art Centre,the Natal Technikon and the University of the Wit-watersrand. He is well known for using the elements of air,fire, water and earth to make his work. His most recent exhibition was Points ofthe Delta at Michael Stevenson Contemporary, Cape Town (2003). He has shown on group exhibitions including Lexicons and Labyrinths:Iconography ofthe Genome at the South African Museum,Cape Town (2003); Liberated Voices: Contemporary Art from South Africa at the Museum for African Art, New York (1999); Celsius:(New)Art from (New) SA at Ifa Gallery, Bonn (1997); and Graft, on the second Johannesburg Biennale, South African National Gallery, Cape Town (1997).

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Curators

Contributors

David Brodie received his MA Fine Arts in 2001 from the University of the Witwatersrand. He has worked as Curator of Contemporary Collections at Johannesburg Art Gallery and is currently a curator at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg. He was recently involved in curating the DaimlerChrysler Award for Creative Photography 2004 at MuseumAfrica,Johannesburg. He was one of 15 curators who contributed to the forthcoming book, 10 Years 100 Artists (Bell-Roberts Publishing, Cape Town).

Okwui Enwezor is founder and editor of Nka:Joumal of Contemporary African Art, based at the African Studies Center, Cornell University, and is presently Visiting Professor at the Henry Clay Frick Department of History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and at the Department of Archaeology and Art History, Columbia University, New York. He was Artistic Director of Documental I (2002),and of the second Johannesburg Biennale (1997). He has curated many exhibitions, including The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 19451994.

Laurie Ann Farrell is Curator at the Museum for African Art, New York, where she has worked on many exhibitions including Looking Both Ways:Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora and Liberated Voices: Contemporary Art from South Africa. She writes on the subject of contemporary art from Africa and has contributed articles and reviews to 2wice,African Arts, ArtThrob,Art South Africa and Nka:Journal of Contemporary African Art. She received her MA in African Art History and Theory from the University of Arizona. Churchill Madikida See Artists Sophie Perryer has worked as arts editor for a number of print and internet publishing projects,including the Mail & Guardian newspaper and the website ArtThrob. She was the founding editor of Art South Africa magazine, heading the publication from 2002-2004. She is the editor of the forthcoming book on contemporary art in a democratic South Africa, 10 Years 100 Artists (BellRobert Publishing, Cape Town). She has an Honours degree in Art History from the University of Cape Town.

Tracy Murinik is an independent art writer and critic based in Cape Town. She has a BA in Art History and English from the University of the Witwatersrand. She worked as a co-ordinator for the first and second Johannesburg Biennales in 1995 and 1997. She contributes regularly to Art South Africa and other publications, and was a Cape Town art critic for the Mail & Guardian newspaper for over three years. She is the author of a Fresh monograph on Moshekwa Langa, published by Iziko South African National Gallery (Cape Town, 2003),and was one of 15 curators who contributed to the forthcoming book, 10 Years 100 Artists (Bell-Roberts Publishing, Cape Town). Liese van der Watt See Curators

Liese van der Watt teaches Art History and Popular Culture at the University of Cape Town and works in the area of contemporary African and South African art.The author of a number of catalogue essays and articles, her main focus falls on issues of identity and representation. She graduated with a PhD from State University of New York at Stony Brook in 2003, where she had been a Fulbright scholar from 1999. Her dissertation focused on whiteness in post-apartheid South African visual culture.

MUSEUM FOR AFRICAN ART

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Mr. and Mrs. Charles B. Benenson Mr. Lawrence Benenson Mr. Ed Bradley and Ms. Patricia Blanchet Martin and Shirley Brasier Mr. Bruce Brickman Dr. and Mrs. Sidney Clyman Mr. Jonathan D. Green Mr. Irwin Ginsburg Mr. Lawrence Gussman Mr. Hans Hageman Ms. Kimberly Hardy Dr. Sidney Hart Ms. Jane B. Holzer Ms. Patricia Irvin, Esq. Helen and Martin Kimmel Mrs. Jo Levitt Dr. Andreas Lindner Drs. Marian and Daniel Malcolm Jennifer and Art Mbanefo Ms. Veronica Pollard Mr. Onuoha Odim Mr. and Mrs. James J. Ross Lynne and Robert Rubin Daniel Shapiro and Agnes Gund Mr. Dennis Swanson

Ms. Joan Barist Mr. and Mrs. Carlo Bella Diana and Richard Beattie Mr. and Mrs. Kojo Bentil Linda and Bruce Bodner Mr. and Mrs. Woodrow Campbell Mr. and Mrs. Louis Capozzi Ms. Gwen L. Carr John W. Carr, Esq. Ms. Diahann Carroll Mr. David Christensen Dorothy and Lewis Cullman Mr. Samuel S. Daniel Mr. Charles Davis Kurt and Mary Delbanco Lee Dunham Drs. Jean and Noble Endicott Mr. Lance Entwistle Dr. and Mrs. Aaron Esman Michael and Nancy Feller Ms. Vianna Finch Ms. Jane Fincher Jacques and Nathalie Germain Denyse and Marc Ginzberg Mr. David GoWring Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Goldstone Mr. James Gorman Mr. Jonathan D. Green Myrna and Stephen Greenberg Ms. Gail Gregg and Mr. Arthur Sulzberger Lesley and Evan Heller Mr. and Mrs. John Herrmann Mr. Derek Q. Johnson Mr. LLoyd Kaplan Ms. Zelda Kaplan Mr. and Mrs. Peter Klosowicz Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Kramer Mr. and Mrs. Jay Last Carat and Joe Lebworth Mrs. Dorothy Lichtenstein Mr. Adam Lindemann Mr. Vincent Mai Ms. Marian MariII Ms. Elsie McCabe

Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Murnick Amyas Naegle Mr. Robert Neimeth Mr. and Mrs. Richard Parsons Mr. and Mrs. Peter 0. Price Mr. David Rockefeller Beatrice Riese Holly and David Ross Mrs. Harry Rubin Mr. Bruce Saber Mr. Ralph Schlosstein Dr. and Mrs. Morton Schwimmer Mr. and Mrs. Maurice Solomon Mr. Jeff Soref The Honorable Percy C. Sutton Julie Taymor Mr. Jonathan M. Tisch Mr. Bernard Tschumi Ms. Helen Tucker Mr. Kevin Umeh Ms. Ellen Urell Mr. Jerome Vogel Ms. Claudia Wagner Mr. Robert T. Wall Mr. Tom Wesselmann Janice Savin Williams and Christopher J. Williams Ms. Elease Wright Harold and Maureen Zarember Mr. Daniel Ziff Mr. Al Zollar Anonymous Mr. and Mrs. Roger Altman Ms. Lillian Barrios-Paoli Mrs. Patti Cadby Birch Mr. and Mrs. Daniel L. Black Ronald and Linda Blatt Ms. Betty Bobrow Ms. Janis Gardner Cecil Christo and Jeanne Claude Mrs. Katherine Cline Dr. and Mrs. Oliver E. Cobb Ms. Martha Cotter and Mr. Alan Sussman Mr. and Mrs. Thomas D'Agostino Ms. Gail Yvette Davis Ms. Barbaralee Diamonstein and Mr. Carl Spielvogel The Honorable David N. Dinkins James R. and Nina H. Donnelley Ms. Susan Fales-Hill Mr. Richard Faletti Mr. Bill Hodges Mr. and Mrs. Carroll Janis Ellen Kaplowitz Mr. Luciano Lanfranchi Guy and Roxanne Lanquetot Leonard and Evelyn Lauder Diane and Brian Leyden Mr. Robin Magowan and Ms. Juliet Mattila Mr. Peter Marino Mr. Raymond J. McGuire Ms. Bella Meyer Mr. Steven Morris Mr. Harvey S. Shipley Miller Mrs. Kendall A. Mix Ms. Maria Patterson Mr. and Mrs. Sammy Ofer Mr. and Mrs. Fred M. Richman Mr. and Mrs. Richard Rothman Ms. Elizabeth Seidman Ms. Carolyn Setlow Ms. Ruth Lande Shuman Merton D. Simpson Ms. Lowery Stokes Sims Ms. Victoria Lea Smith Ann and Paul Sperry Mr. and Mrs. Toshiaki Taguchi Mr. Lucien Van de Velde Ms. Kathy van der Pas Mr. William Van Parys Ms. Adrienne Vittadini Mr. and Mrs. George Wein Dr. Frederick B. Williams Mr. and Mrs. Lester Wunderman

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Mr. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Mrs. Nane Annan Mr. George Arzt Walter and Molly Bareiss Dr. and Mrs. Lynn and Samuel Berkowitz Mr. Joseph C. Bosch Dr. Marie Buncombe-Dodd Ms. Linda Cahill Mr. and Mrs. James Christensen Dr. and Mrs. Oliver E. Cobb Mr. Edward Dandridge Lila and Gerald Dannenberg Mr. and Mrs. Ronald Feldman The Reverend Cad E. Flemister Mr. James E. Frazier Mr. Helio Fred Garcia Dr. and Mrs. Phillip George Ms. Elaine Gilde Mr. lido Horstman Ms. Claudia Kahn Ms. Gail Koff Amy and Elliot Lawrence Ms. Loida Lewis Samuel and Gabrielle Lurie Ms. Nancy Maynard Mr. and Mrs. Ronald Nicholson Dr. and Mrs. Emanuel Papper Ms. Ceil Pulitzer Mr. and Mrs. Carl Randolph Darwin and Geri Reedy Carl and Estelle Reiner Tracey and Phillip Riese Ms. Paulina Rogawski Marvin and Elsa Ross-Greifinger Ms. Barbara Rubin Mr. and Mrs. Ira Sahlman Ms. Miya Sanson Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Sarnoff Robert and Natalie Schaffer Ms. Betsy Seidman Mr. Sydney L. Shaper Ms. Mary Jo Shepard Dr. Jerome H. Siegel Edwin and Cherie Silver Mr. Sydney L. Shaper Katherine and Kenneth Snelson Mr. and Mrs. Eliot Spitzer Mr. Howard Tanenbaum Mr. and Mrs. W. Vranken-Hoet Ms. Ruth Ziegler Michelle and Claude Winfield

Current as of 4 August 2004

Board of Trustees

Finance

Robert Rubin Jason H. Wright Co-Chairs

Andrei Nadler Controller

Jane Katcher Vice Chair

Margarita Khaimova Accountant Operations

Onuoha Odim Treasurer Veronica Pollard Secretary Conce Canton Arman Lawrence Benenson Edward Dandridge Arnold Donald Irwin Ginsburg Jonathan D. Green Dr. Andreas Lindner William Lynch, Jr. Bruce Saber Hiroshi Tada Dennis D. Swanson John Tishman Phyllis Woolley James J. Ross Life Trustee

Staff Executive Elsie Crum McCabe President Jerome Vogel Deputy Director Kenita Lloyd Director of Operations Curatorial Laurie Ann Farrell Curator Giacomo Mirabella Registrar Carol Braide Publications Manager Development Margo Donaldson Senior Development Officer Jennifer Goldberg Manager, Individual and Institutional Relationships Education Heidi Holder Director of Museum Education Sarah Adelman Museum Educator

Lawrence Ekechi Yensi Martinez Winston Rodney Winston M. Rodney Security Retail Jerome Vogel Store Manager Clement Coulibaly Cheick Cisse Sales Associates Lawrence Kendle Stock Shipping Volunteers Toanna Abdool Nancy Clipper Karen Guzman DuIce Holley Evelyn Leary Shalewa Mackall LewEleanor McNeely Margarita Mesa Allison Moore Yvonne Rabsatt Sandra Schofield Tanya Serdiuk Temitayo Shajuyigbe Pamela St. Cyr Emma Stein Aiesha Turman Wendy Urquhart Paul Weidner Claude L. Winfield Latasha Wilson-Brown Lisa Yancowski

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